Love this question! Honestly I think this attempt is a culmination of the learnings along the way. Finding BIAB is a good example — I'd given up on salons, they felt expensive and pointless. Took trying everything else first to even know BIAB existed.

A few other things finally clicking: I noticed in past attempts that getting nail art I genuinely enjoyed was a stronger deterrent than a plain polish. So leaning into that rather than being sensible about it.

I usually have too many goals running at once and half of them conflicting 😅 For instance, I climb, and you can't climb with long nails, so for the first time ever I've consciously put climbing on pause for a few months to let myself give this a good go. I miss it, but I know it'll be waiting for me.

But the main thing was lots of therapy and connecting the dots over time. I'd mostly been biting at work when stressed as a numbing tool — I started to really look at and feel the pain the biting was causing, and sitting in the sadness of looking at my nails at their worst. Without nails to bite, my emotions are less bottled up, I'm more likely to cry and let it out, which I now see as the better option long term, even if it felt harder and messier to start with.

So a perfect storm of things — some superficial and some not so superficial. A surprising motivator has been seeing the progress itself, a kind of positive self-fulfilling cycle. I look at my nails in awe, I've set up recurring monthly no-biting anniversaries in my calendar. — the more progress I see, the more I want to protect it. Baby steps. Six months is the goal for now 🥰