Silver Clipboard: Time Management Skills and Personal Productivity Tools

Every year the biology department of our lab conducts an experiment to see where the most bacteria live. The students take samples with cotton swabs from different places in the school. The results are always a surprise to them: the toilet seat is nearly bacteria-free and their hands are bacteria farms. However, the winner for most bacteria nearly every year is chewed pen caps.

Think about it: the pen caps are in your mouth — a disgusting place to start with. Your teeth grind the surface, pitting it and making it more inhabitable. Your saliva, an excellent growth medium, remains on the surface and the pen travels everywhere: backpacks, tables, books, the floor, other peoples’ hands (and mouths) and then back into your own mouth.

It’s the perfect disease vector for a school.

Breaking the habit of chewing on your pen cap will help reduce your exposure to disease. But how to break that habit? While there are many methods to punish yourself (such as snapping a rubber band against your wrist) they require you to be proactive. Who wants that? People are lazy and don’t (usually) enjoy hurting themselves. Passive, automatic punishments are the most effective.

Here’s the solution: go into a drug store and buy the stuff they sell to stop people from biting their nails. It’s a clear varnish you paint on your nails that has a bitter, unpleasant taste. Then, paint it on the bottom and top of your pen. This way, the next time you accidently put the pen in your mouth, you’ll know.

After a few days of this, the negative reinforcement adds up quickly. I tried it, and after about three weeks the habit was solidly broken. It’s been months now and even without painting the caps of all my pens, the habit is broken.

Do yourself a favor and [click here to get some anti-nail-biting varnish].

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Header photograph by orangeacid