I have bitten the inside of my lip 5 times in the past two days. Really bitten it. Four days ago i bit the side of my tongue so hard that I begged Adrienne to knock me out.
BIting your lip or tongue is horrible! Part of what makes it so bad is that it is always unexpected, you never set out to take a chunk out of your cheek. I think what makes it truly terrible is that it launches a fight-or-flight response left over from when being bitten was much more common and certainly a cause for alarm.
Your brain is screaming, “We are under attack!”, and your stress level is worsened by the inability to escape from your own mouth. The fight response just leads to more pain. I once fought back and launched a fight-or-flight death spiral that ended with me running down the hall screaming as I socked myself in the mouth repeatedly.
I shouldn’t be biting myself in the first place. Natural selection should have provided me with lips and a tongue that are capable of staying out of the way of my teeth (Or is it my underused canine teeth going feral and demanding flesh?). And, I think it is fair to ask, why do I REPEATEDLY bite myself?! Shouldn’t survival of the fittest have taken care of that whole ridiculous, “bite lip, lip swells into path of teeth, bite lip every-freaking-time you breathe” cycle of destruction?
I am an evolutionary failure.