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(i'm going to bold the methods since i like to type a lot!)
anyway, i wanted to share with you all a couple of methods to reduce picking that i've found actually work. a while ago when i had my own apartment, i covered up all of my mirrors in cloths, and brought the biggest one into my dark bedroom with no lights, so that i could just see how my outfits looked. it turned out that the bathroom light leaked in just a little, so i could see a portion of my right cheek in the mirror, and funny enough, that ended up being the ONLY region of my face with acne. just more proof to myself that picking was the root cause.
now i'm in an apartment with my boyfriend (who doesn't want his house to look like a paranoid schizophrenic's with all the mirrors covered up), and he has one of those cool red light heat lamps in his bathroom. (i think they're also so you can run to the bathroom to pee in the middle of the night and not kill your nighttime vision) what i figured out from this is that with only the red light on, all reds in the room are canceled out, making my skin look AMAZING. i can never find any little pimples to pick, it's great. it ends up skyrocketing my self esteem and making me skip out of the bathroom thinking my skin is flawless (and thus not picking trying to "get rid of" pimples)
another method, because sometimes i do find mirrors to pick in, is to divert my OCD. i was in therapy for a great while for insomnia (she of course coaxed out all my nervous nighttime habits preventing sleep), and her greatest challenge in me was to stop my picking. she was so excited one day when she came back from a psychologist convention (sounds fun right?
) and learned of this method of diverting people with that tiny-picky-type OCD. she said i should try drawing little circles on a piece of paper, and placing tiny round stickers perfectly inside the lines. it sounded awesome, but unproductive. so i found another method that she of course wasn't happy with, and that was plucking out hairs that didn't matter (different from trichotillomania, really!) when i would do this to my pubic hairs (the most satisfying of all to pluck, because of those thick white cartilaginous pieces on the ends) i would get insane ugly ingrown hairs (=scars, yeah, i look like i was in some kind of sexy battle). so, now, i do it to my leg hairs. specifically the knees, cause those hairs are the thickest and darkest, and thus reveal the nice thick white cartilaginous pieces on the ends. this i find is VERY CLOSE TO AS SATISFYING as picking pimples. now, when i start to try to examine my face in the mirror, i just think of how much fun it'll be to instead pluck out my knee hairs later.man, we're all such normal people here
