Habits, tics, and stuttering. Prevalence and relation to anxiety and somatic awareness.
In college students, self-reported nervous habits rise alongside anxiety and body awareness, a pattern that later work ties to weaker impulse control in clinical groups.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked college students to fill out three short surveys. One listed nervous habits like nail-biting, hair-twirling, and throat-clearing. The other two measured general anxiety and how much they notice body sensations.
They wanted to see if students who reported more habits also felt more anxious and paid more attention to bodily cues.
What they found
Students who ticked more habits also scored higher on anxiety and body-awareness scales. The link was positive: more habits went with more worry and more focus on internal feelings.
In plain words, the kids who bite their nails also report butterflies in their stomach more often.
How this fits with other research
Whitehouse et al. (2014) extends the same idea to adults with Tourette syndrome. They found that stronger bodily awareness pairs with weaker impulse control, giving the 1996 correlation a clinical twist.
Griffith et al. (2012) sweep tics and habits into one big “abnormal repetitive behavior” bucket. Their review says these behaviors may share the same brain circuitry, so the survey pattern W et al. saw could reflect deeper wiring.
Green et al. (2020) flips the lens. They show that college students judge other people’s stereotypy harshly. Taken together, the same population that reports private habits also stigmatizes public ones, a useful caution for self-monitoring programs.
Why it matters
If your client reports lots of “nervous” habits, ask about anxiety and body awareness. Simple check-ins like “Where do you feel stress in your body?” can open the door to relaxation or acceptance skills. The data say these pieces travel together, so treating one may ease the others.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study examines the prevalence of nervous habits, tics and stuttering in 256 college students, as well as the relationship between these behaviors and self-reported general anxiety and awareness of bodily sensations. Improving on previous studies, this study strengthens the operational definition of a nervous habit by using a more stringent operational definition, giving what is arguably a more valid set of prevalence statistics. Participants were asked to complete self-report measures of general anxiety and somatic awareness. Relationships were found between number of nervous habits and tics that participants endorsed and their self-reported awareness of bodily sensations, as well as between number of habits endorsed and self-reported general anxiety. This article concludes with suggestions for future research in the area of nervous habits and motor tics.
Behavior modification, 1996 · doi:10.1177/01454455960202005