People who gnaw like beavers on fingernails, idle when given work to do or “ghost” friends and dates can come across as skittish, lazy to the point of being sackable, or obnoxiously narcissistic.
But such self-vandalism could well be rooted in survival instincts. So says psychologist Charlie Heriot-Maitland, who in his newly-published Controlled Explosions In Mental Health seeks to explain why people seemingly cannot help but engage in reputation-damaging “small harms" and "self-sabotaging."
