BFRB Awareness Week: Dates, BFRB Con, and How to Take Part

If you bite your nails, pick your skin or pull your hair, you may never have been in a room — or a thread — where everyone else does it too. BFRB Awareness Week, October 1–7, is the one week of the year built around exactly that.

Below: the dates, who is behind the week now that its longtime organizer has wound down, BFRB Con in Oxford the day after, and ways to take part that don’t involve posting anything you’d regret. We revise the dates section each year once organizers publish their plans.

What BFRB Awareness Week Is

Body-focused repetitive behaviors are, in the International OCD Foundation’s definition, behaviors focused on your own body — biting, pulling, picking or scraping hair, skin, lips, cheeks or nails — that cause physical damage you didn’t intend, and that you’ve tried more than once to stop. The common ones:

• Nail biting (onychophagia). Biting the nails, cuticles or the skin around them.
• Skin picking (excoriation disorder). Picking at skin, scabs or bumps.
• Hair pulling (trichotillomania). Pulling hair, most often from the scalp or eyebrows, though any hair on the body can be a target.
• Cheek and lip biting. Chewing the inside of the cheeks or the lips.

Every October 1–7, people with these behaviors, their families and clinicians use the week to — in the words of the TLC Foundation’s awareness week page — “generate awareness, grow connections, build understanding, and smash shame.” TLC, the US nonprofit that ran the week for years, used the theme “BFRB Brave” for 2025.

Who is behind it now

In October 2025, TLC announced that it could no longer operate as a standalone organization. It said it would wind down and partner with the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF), which now hosts BFRB resources and says it is continuing TLC’s work. As of mid-September 2026, TLC’s awareness week page still shows the 2025 edition, and neither organization’s site lists an official 2026 program. The dates don’t belong to any one group, though, and at least one community group is already listing events (see below).

Why a week matters for something people hide

BFRBs are common and rarely talked about. In a 2018 study in Psychiatry Research of 4,335 college students, about 12% met criteria for a pathological BFRB. Few of them had sought help. The BFRB Con organizers at the University of Oxford say on their conference page that shame and stigma lead many people to conceal the behavior, and that only a small minority ever seek support. A week when bringing it up is the whole point makes the first sentence easier to say.

If “BFRB” is a new word to you, the reading order near the end of this page is a good place to start.

Key Dates for 2026

• BFRB Awareness Week: Thursday, October 1 to Wednesday, October 7, 2026.
• BFRB Con 2026: Thursday, October 8 to Saturday, October 10, in Oxford, UK. Online registration closes October 1, according to the organizers.
• An online event during the week: the Picking Me Foundation, a skin picking nonprofit, lists a ticketed BFRB Film Festival on Zoom on Saturday, October 3, 2026.
• The US conference: TLC cancelled its 2025 annual conference, and its transition announcement said BFRB programming would move to the IOCDF’s Annual OCD Conference (Seattle, July 2026). Watch the IOCDF’s site for future years.

The organizers set these dates, venues and programs, and any of them can change. Check each organizer’s own site before you book travel or buy a ticket.

What Happens at BFRB Con

BFRB Con is hosted and led by the University of Oxford and follows an earlier Oxford BFRB conference in 2024. The 2026 edition takes place at the Life and Mind Building on South Parks Road in central Oxford. The provisional program has two overlapping tracks:

• Scientific program (Thursday lunchtime to Friday). Talks, panels, posters and networking for dermatologists, psychologists, neuroscientists and others, with the skin–brain relationship as this year’s central theme.
• Community program (Friday afternoon to Saturday). For people who live with BFRBs and the people who support them. Community attendees are invited to the scientific sessions too, and Saturday is a dedicated community day. The organizers say attendees of all ages are welcome.
• An evening performance. TRICH: a solo show, a one-person play about living with trichotillomania, is scheduled for Friday evening and included with registration.

Tickets cover the science days, the community day or the whole conference, with discounts for full-time students and under-18s, and the registration form asks about accessibility needs. One change to know about: in September 2026, BFRB UK & Ireland withdrew as community partner after a disagreement about a sponsor’s involvement. The organizers say the combined program is going ahead as planned.

If you’re going alone, start with the community day, which is built for people with lived experience rather than professionals. Pick one or two sessions in advance, and remember you don’t have to tell your story to anyone.

If you can’t attend

An online ticket streams the scientific sessions, but the organizers say it isn’t a fully hybrid event and community sessions won’t be streamed. Some sessions will be recorded and made freely available afterward. Otherwise, pick one of the options below — none of them needs a ticket.

Five Ways to Take Part, From Private to Public

Pick the step that fits where you are. None of them requires posting a photo, naming your employer, or announcing anything on a public profile.

1. Keep it private. Read one explainer, then write down three situations where the behavior tends to happen. That’s the whole task, and it counts.
2. Tell one person. The short script in the next section is designed for this.
3. Join a conversation online. Use the site’s directory of BFRB communities to find one. A good first post is short: you’re new, here’s what you do and what you’ve tried, no photos.
4. Start a two-week baseline. Log episodes from October 1 to October 14. The details are further down.
5. Go in person, or get professional help. That could be BFRB Con, a local or online support group, or a therapist trained in habit reversal training or the Comprehensive Behavioral (ComB) model. The IOCDF’s resource directory lists BFRB therapists and support groups. For nail or skin damage that isn’t healing, see a GP or dermatologist. If you zone out or replay difficult memories while picking or pulling, tell the therapist. They can help with that too.

How to Tell One Person

One trusted person is enough — the point is to stop carrying it alone, not to make an announcement. The site’s piece on shame explains why the secrecy itself makes the habit heavier.

Choose the person carefully. Disclosure doesn’t automatically go down well: in a 2005 study in Body Image, young adults read a short vignette about a character, and the character who briefly disclosed trichotillomania was rated more negatively and more socially rejected than one who didn’t. That’s a reason to pick your listener, not a reason to stay silent.

A script you can adapt:

“Can I tell you something small? I bite my nails — or pick my skin, or pull my hair — and it’s more than a habit I can just drop. It’s called a body-focused repetitive behavior, it’s common, and it’s treatable. I’m not asking you to do anything, and please don’t point it out when you see it. I just didn’t want to keep hiding it from you.”

If you want their help, name it exactly: “a quiet tap on the table is fine, but not in front of other people.” If they joke or tell you to just stop, you can end it there: “Okay, I just wanted you to know.” Their reaction shows how much they know about BFRBs, not what you’re worth.

Posting Etiquette During the Week

If you do post during the week, a few norms make BFRB spaces safer for everyone, including the people reading along who haven’t posted yet:

• Content warnings first. Put a clear warning line before describing damage in words. Many people say that graphic descriptions or images can set off a session.
• No wound photos. Healed-nail progress photos are fine where group rules allow them. Bleeding, open skin and fresh damage are not, even behind a warning.
• Other people’s stories aren’t yours to share. Don’t post someone else’s photos, “before” shots or stories without permission, and don’t screenshot threads onto other platforms.
• Answer relapse posts with what helped you. Don’t list what they did wrong, and never tell them to “just stop.”
• No product pushing. That includes apps like the one this site makes. A thread full of people on a hard day isn’t an audience.
• Leave room for sensory needs. If you’re autistic or have ADHD, the sensory side — stimming, needing something in your hands — belongs in the conversation. It isn’t a character flaw.
• Keep children’s hands off the internet. Parents: don’t post photos of your child’s hands or skin, even anonymously. The posting norms on this page are written for adults.

When a thread isn’t the right place

BFRBs and self-harm are different things. A 2020 study in the Journal of Psychiatric Research notes that the DSM-5 treats them as distinct categories, and found that people with BFRBs were more likely to do the behavior automatically, without reflective awareness. If you, or someone posting, is hurting themselves on purpose or thinking about suicide, that needs a crisis line, not a comment thread. In the US, call or text 988. In the UK and Ireland, call Samaritans free on 116 123. Anywhere else, contact your local emergency number.

The same goes for infection. MedlinePlus describes paronychia as a painful, red, swollen area around the nail, sometimes with pus-filled blisters, and names biting or picking a hangnail as one cause. If you have that, see a doctor instead of asking a forum. Get medical care right away if you also have a fever, chills or red streaks along the skin, because those are signs the infection may be spreading.

Use the Week to Start a Two-Week Baseline

If awareness week makes you want to work on the behavior, start by recording it, not by trying to stop. A 2019 review in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience notes that the original habit reversal procedure included recording the habit and awareness training among its components. The full protocol is in the site’s guide to habit reversal training; this log is only the on-ramp.

From October 1 to October 14, note each episode you catch: time and place, what you were doing, what your hands were doing just before, urge strength from 1 to 5, and whether you noticed it during or only afterward. Two example entries:

Oct 2, 3:40 pm · desk · reading email · hand resting on chin · urge 3/5 · noticed after (two nails done)
Oct 2, 9:15 pm · couch · scrolling phone · thumb on cuticle · urge 2/5 · noticed during, stopped

By October 14, look for the two or three situations that keep repeating, and count how many entries say “during” versus “after.” Lots of “after” is normal at the start — the IOCDF notes that picking and pulling often happen outside awareness, for example while reading, sitting at a desk or working on a computer. That ratio is the thing awareness training aims to shift.

If you spend your workday at a Mac, Nailed, a free menu bar app, can supply “noticed during” moments for that part of the day: it watches the camera on-device and puts a red alert on screen when your hand stays near your mouth. It keeps no history, can’t see picking or pulling, can’t tell biting from resting your chin on your hand, and only works while you’re at the Mac with monitoring on (macOS 12 or later, M1 Mac or newer). The paper log still does the counting.

If You Only Just Learned the Word “BFRB”

If you’ve only just found out that what you do has a name, you’re in good company — many people say the name alone is a relief. A sensible reading order:

1. Start with the big picture: what BFRBs are, including types, causes and treatments.
2. Then the classification question: how BFRBs differ from OCD — worth knowing now that an OCD organization carries on TLC’s work, because related isn’t the same.
3. Then the posts already linked above, in this order: shame, habit reversal, and the community directory for when you’re ready for other people.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. If you are concerned about a body-focused repetitive behavior, skin or nail damage, or signs of infection, consult a qualified healthcare professional for personalized assessment and guidance.

Frequently Asked Questions