Thread: Peeling Toenails In My Sleep

If you've been peeling your fingernails and toenails for years, this behaviour might be firmly ingrained into your psyche.

I think you would need to get professional advice, from more than one source.

When you say peeling your toenails, do you mean ripping them out of your toes? Or do you mean just pulling them back at an angle to your toe?

If you could successfully prevent access to your toenails during sleep, the behaviour might cease.

I hope you find a solution.

No, not ripping the nail right out.

Just the top edge, more of the margin when you trim them
with nailclippers. only you are trying to do it crudely with your
fingers.

As I know, quite a few people do it to semiconsciously during
the daytime, especially to their fingernails, such as when watching
TV. However, I seem to be the only one so far that does it during
sleep.

Sometimes, however, too much gets "peeled" off, especially the
part of the nail near the corner of the big toe, and that is when it
might cause ingrown nails when it grows back.

Yes, as you may read, I have been wearing socks on suggestion
of others in an attempt to prevent access to the toenails. Mostly
successful so far, except for my left big toe for unknown reasons,
when I occasionally take off the left sock semiconsciously or
subconsciously to reach it !

The brain is a very complex organ indeed.

A psychiatrist told me this was OCD, and suggested antidepressants,
saying that psychotherapy was "too tedious".

However, I am reluctant to take SSRIs.

A GP mentioned this was nothing very serious, and said that
cognitive behavioural techniques could likely help me.
He doesn't practise this though, and I would have to find
a source myself.

Get creative on ways to prevent access to the toes.

- You can try wrapping the big left toe with sticky tape, which can be very diffifult to remove.

- Try preventing your fingers from working properly. Wear those mittens that you can put your entire hands in, without individual fingers. Or tape up your middle and index fingers - they are the ones required for complex manipulation.

I think don't think antidepressants is the way to go. In fact, I don't think drugs are the way to go at all. I think this is behavioural, not some chemical imbalance.

Good luck.

Gloves, socks, and tape sound like good ideas. You could even do something to block your hands that requires real conscious manipulation to get around- like gloves that are tied together that you can only pull off while awake with your teeth? Could try something like safety-pinning your socks to the hems of your pajama pants, or even sewing some into the pants. I can imagine it would be hard to get around that.

If you DO cause an ingrown nail it's best to take immediate action. I've found that soaking in hot salty water, then using a disinfectant and something like neosporin, and then jamming a bit off cotton ball under the part growing into the skin usually works within a few days to raise the nail up and avoid it actually becoming ingrown. I am one of those daytime people so unfortunately I've had a bit of experience

Might want to see, before you spend money, if there's a way to prevent yourself from doing this and keep it up for a month or so. Maybe after a while you'll just grow out of the habit. Would also be interesting to see if it's some sort of sleep-walking behavior or something and you are, on some level, 'awake' and conscious. I've never heard of this before.

Thank you, Flashdance and Shift.

I shall certainly consider all your good suggestions, both
regarding the toenail-peeling and ingrown toenails, all very
interesting and innovative. Had never thought of them.

As you said, Shift, it does sound like a very rare and weird
behavior, rarer than sleepwalking. Must sound to you like
I am trying to do yoga in my sleep.

A GP once also suggested trying the cottonball trick for
ingrown toenails (this was some years ago and due to
other common causes, before I started having this weird
sleep problem), but there was one awkward time when
a small bit of the cotton got stuck deep in the nail, and
I nearly couldn't get it out !