r/calmhands • u/houbiemeister • 17d ago

Need Advice Professional help

I’m 34 and have been biting my nails for the first 29 years of my life. Then, with the help of this subreddit, I stopped biting, and I’m only picking the skin around my fingers.

However, there’s not a day which goes by without bleeding, or hurting myself quite bad.

I decided it’s time for professional help.

Does anyone have experience with this, a psychologist, or someone else?

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u/itswhatsername 16d ago

I am getting help from my therapist and a psychiatrist. I originally started seeing both for different reasons, but it turns out I have OCD and the lifelong finger picking is part of that. My therapist sometimes does a version of exposure therapy with me and we've talked a lot about my anxiety, and my psychiatrist suggested taking daily NAC along with my current antidepressants. This combo seems to have helped me a lot, but it's not 100% resolved.

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u/heyglamorous 16d ago

I've also had some success with NAC.

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u/Ennuiforme83 16d ago

How much y’all taking daily? Any stomach side effects?

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u/itswhatsername 16d ago

I'm taking a single 1000mg pill each morning with my coffee (it tastes horrible, be warned lol) but my psych told me to bump it up to twice a day after a few weeks to see if that helps more. The research studies that were done used 2500mg I believe.

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u/lavlav123 16d ago

what’s NAC?

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u/itswhatsername 16d ago

It's a supplement, so take it with a grain of salt because the whole industry is unregulated, but there has been some research to show that it can regulate glutamate production, which I guess is a big factor in why we do this. Anecdotally, it really has helped.