For this round of habit tracking, I tracked my habit of picking at my lip. I completed this exercise throughout Sunday and Monday to gather data during a relatively busy day (Monday) and a much more unstructured one (Sunday) to see if there were any behavioral differences across my different schedules. I logged data every thirty minutes, every time the behavior occurred, and any time a related behavior occurred (tracing my lip, biting my lip with my teeth, rubbing my lips together to check the texture, and almost going to pick my lip but stopping). I also kept track of the context of each lip-picking event, the activity I was partaking in, and whether the picking resulted in bleeding. Overall, I discovered that my picking comes from fidgeting, decreases in social interactions, and is likely affected by ambient temperature and humidity.
My experiences on Sunday and Monday were drastically different. On Sunday, I had a long FaceTime call with my partner in the morning, during which I did not pick my lip. This is partially because my partner calls me out on the behavior every time I do it to get me to stop. Another factor is that during long social interactions, I talk both with my mouth and my hands too much to have enough time to pick my lip instead. Especially given that this was a video call, my hand gestures were certainly a factor.
Another factor of Sunday that I noticed was that I stayed indoors for most of the day with my windows closed. In the absence of the cold and dry air outside and the constant presence of my lip balm in my desk drawer, my lips were far less chapped and dry, which meant there was less for me to notice or gain traction with. Throughout the entire day, I did not pick my lip at all until just before bed while browsing on my phone.
The phone browsing would become foreshadowing for the debacle that was Monday. On Monday, I picked my lip on 9 separate occasions, not to mention the 7 times on top of that where I traced my lip. I only drew blood once, which is an overall improvement I attribute to being more aware of my picking (as I was writing it down every time). Phone browsing is relative to Monday’s picking because of the main contributing factor to my lip picking I discovered while tracking: absentminded boredom. Every time I picked my lip on Monday was while either passively reading emails, Slack messages or texts or sitting in far-less-than-interesting meetings. Picking became something for my hands to do in those idle moments, filling the space. I am curious about whether this is correlated with no longer wearing a certain piece of jewelry – up until a few months ago, I had a puzzle ring that I would often keep my hands busy with, solving it hundreds of times each day without thinking. However, the ring broke, and I have not yet sent it to the artist to be fixed yet.
My connection circle highlights some of the relationships between what I tracked throughout the days. One of the most impactful reinforcing loops in this diagram is the loop between uneven lip texture, lip tracing, and lip picking. After picking my lip, it is more sensitive and has a rougher texture because of my picking. This only tempts me to mess with it more, further damaging my lip until bleeding occurs. Though bleeding was not a major concern throughout the days this study occurred, it is useful to note that sometimes bleeding still does not stop my picking until the texture problem is resolved, which I have been told by my dentist puts me at risk of infection since the injury is so close to my mouth. This is one of the key reasons I hope to stop this behavior.
My fishbone model highlights the myriad factors that contribute to my lip-picking in rough categories. It seems I am mostly affected by environmental factors, though material factors are also interesting to explore as I look into ways to move away from this behavior.
The next time I complete this experiment, I would want to keep track for a full week. Even my Mondays (when I have meetings and rehearsal but no classes) are distinctly different from my Tuesdays (when I am out and about for 13 hours straight between classes and rehearsal), and the difference in class days and no-class days should also be measured. A longer measuring period would likely also reduce some of the severity of the consequences of missing data collection. As this is an absentminded habit of mine, I likely forgot to log every single instance of lip-picking behavior. Increasing the duration to a week would a) help me adjust to the habit of recording my behavior and b) make the impact of missing one instance less severe. I would also like to keep track of this behavior for a week after I have gotten my ring fixed to test if the lip picking has served as a substitute for my ring fidgeting. The potential differences there would help me figure out strategies moving forward that can help me escape this behavior. It would also be good to track screen time to see if that correlates to lip picking, as my absent-minded moments tended to occur while looking at a screen (but then again, they did not when I was on FaceTime – there seems to be much to explore there).
