This isn’t one of my habits, nor is it necessarily a nervous one…but it’s one of the more bizarre and amusing ones I’ve ever heard of.
A friend and coworker of DeathLlama likes to sit on the floor and read…while using a hairdryer. He’ll just sit, hold the book with one hand, and the hairdryer with the other. It’s relaxing, he says. FTR, his hair is essentially a buzz cut. He told me years ago that as a child, he enjoyed reading while lying on the floor near an air vent while the heater was on.
This man is very well-read and educated, and is currently a school administrator.
He is the proud father of a young infant now; we asked if his son has his own hairdryer. No, was the answer–not yet.
I bit my fingernails when I was a kid, but then I stopped because I wanted nicer nails. Now I catch myself tapping my teeth with my nice long fingernails when I am nervous. I cannot imagine how unattractive this looks and sounds.
Not nervous, but another strange habit is that when I’m on the phone at work, I pick up paperclips and unbend them, and then bend them in an L shape. I try as hard as I can to get as close to a perfect right angle as possible. Sometimes for variety, I will go for a triangle shape. I guess that’s not too strange, but a while back, my desk needed to be moved and there was an enormous pile of L shaped (and some triangle) paperclips between the desk and the wall. I had thought I was pretty good at tossing them in the trash when I was done, so the enormous pile was just the ones that had escaped.
I also like to scribble on a piece of paper, with lots of overlapping lines, and then see how many sections I can fill in without having any of the filled-in sections touching another filled-in section. Added challenge: using two different colors of pen, and different colors can touch, but not the same color.
Heh, I go through bouts of feeling guilty about it as well, then I try to rationalize it by thinking the paperclips are provided for my USE, and what difference does it make if some people use them to clip paper together, and I use them as a concentration aid while I am doing phone work?
I grind my teeth/clench and unclench my jaw pretty much 24/7. The boyfriend says at night it sounds like a squeaky crank. I pull apart the split ends of my hair. Some of you hair pullers sound like you may have trich. you should PM me
I constantly rip up paper. Not just pieces of paper. Just anyting paper like. I’m notorious for ripping up the matchbooks. And ciggarette packs. I just shred them into small pieces. And a lot of the time I don’ notice it until my dad yells at me. I also chew on the inside of my lips. There are rough parts that i’ve just torn up. And I used to do this thing in elemetary school where if i was nervous i would blow all the air out of my lungs. All of it, as much as a i could. And if i didn’t get it all out right i’d have a hard time breathing. But thank god I grew out of that.
There was a period of time as a kid when I’d whinny like a horse. No, really.
It started as a joke. You know that crappy Hercules cartoon circa 1970s, in which Herc was normal until he put on a magic ring, held it high over his head and said “By the power of Greyskull” - no, wait, that was He-Man! Anyway, Herc was a regular dude, who would calmly stop what he was doing, put on his ring with the shiny golden “H” on it, and lightning would strike, there would be trumpets, and then he’d kick ass.
He had a stupid centaur sidekick, whose name, I think was Newton. Whenever Newton got scared, he’d flail his arms like a gay man throwing glitter in a Pride parade, and make a terrified horsey sound: “Yee-yee-yee-yee-yee-yee!”
When I was 9, I could imitate that like no one else. I was awesome! I would do it in mock terror and everyone would laugh and laugh. It was the height of my very brief stint as class clown. Teacher suddenly announces a pop-quiz? “Yee-yee-yee-yee-yee-yee!” Little Suzie says she going to tell on you? “Yee-yee-yee-yee-yee-yee!”
Problem was, the joke got so ingrained that, for a period of time, I started doing it when I was legitimately nervous. I embarrassed myself so bad once though, that I finally stopped.