My Bad Habits

Sharing my bad habits with the internets? Well, this is embarrassing. When did I sign up for this? Oh, I remember: when I decided to tackle 31 Days of Habits (go there if you want to read all the posts).

I have two bad habits that I need to work on eliminating.

This gamine lady has a really cute pixie cut. She looks French. Only, no French woman worth her red, white and blue stripes would ever eat in a car. Ever. Eating mindlessly is a very bad habit. But I don’t do that. Here’s what I do:

I eat too fast.

There, I said it. I have a very bad habit of wolfing down my food. I’ve done this since I was a little girl. I blame my early years in public school. I often experienced low blood sugar in the hours between breakfast and lunch, and so once lunch finally came I was practically faint. (I actually did faint a time or two.) So, I would scarf my food down. (Also very un-French.)

The habit stuck, apparently, because I still do it most of the time. But, a couple of weeks ago I became aware of this very bad habit of mine and became determined to do something about it. I developed a little trick I’ll tell you about later. Because honestly, I’m not eating too much, but eating too fast is hardly good for the digestion. It also means you enjoy the food less. As I said in this post about tweaking my coffee drinking, doing anything mindlessly is a bad idea.

Here’s another bad habit.

I chew the inside of my mouth.

I’m not sure exactly when this one began. When I was a child, I chewed my fingernails. That habit mostly went away when I became an adult. And oddly, I don’t engage in either of these oral fixations when I’m pregnant. I have no idea why, but my guess is that the hormones of pregnancy make me feel calmer and less anxious. These habits are “nervous habits”.

What’s strange is that both my sister and my maternal grandmother also chew their mouths – is there a hereditary component at work here? Mouth chewing is a hard habit to break because once you do it, the inside of your lips and cheeks are all jagged and torn, which makes you want to chew more. It looks terrible, and if I do it a lot, I get this awful wrinkle on my left cheek. Not good.

But, I’ve been getting better. And the more my mouth heals, the less I feel inclined to chew. I’ll tell you how I’m working on this later.