Biting a nail from time to time can be considered a fairly common practice ( 25% of the world’s population does it ) but when it becomes a compulsive habit it is already a problem since the damage can reach levels important to our health. But, how do these obsessive-compulsive habits arise that affect many people in the world?
From biting your nails to scratching your skin, touching your hair, rubbing your eyes … compulsive habits can affect our relationships with others . Now, a new study carried out by a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge (UK) has just shed light on this in their study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry .
According to experts, a failure to “turn on” the brain’s control system could lay the foundations for compulsions in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), leaving out theories that these disorders are caused by worries or obsessions on the part of the subjects, but by a condition brought about when the brain’s habit system goes haywire .
To reach this conclusion, the researchers scanned the brains of 37 patients with OCD and 33 people without the disorder . They subjected the volunteers to a repetitive behavioral response test, finding that OCD patients were less able to stop their habits while excessive brain activity was observed in the caudate nucleus , a region that must be “turned on” correctly in order for us to control our habits since it participates in the modulation of movement.
Thus, scientists believe that compulsions may be caused by a malfunction in the brain’s habit system and that these findings are not specific for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but for any habit of a repetitive nature.
“It is not just OCD, there are a number of human behaviors that are now considered examples of compulsivity , including drug abuse, alcohol and bingeing. What all these behaviors have in common is the loss of top-down control, perhaps due to a lack of communication between the regions that control our habit and those that, like the prefrontal cortex, that normally help control volitional behavior. ”Explains Claire Gillan, co-author of the study.
“While some habits can make our lives easier, such as automating the act of preparing coffee in the morning, others go too far and can take control of our lives in a much more insidious way with the formation of our preferences, beliefs, and in the case of OCD, even our fears. Such conditions are among the most difficult to treat, either by cognitive behavior therapy or by drugs ”, clarifies Trevor Robbins, co-author of the work.
