Abstract. It is hereby established that, in Euclidean spaces of finite dimension, bounded selfcontracted curves have finite length. This extends the main result of [6] concerning continuous planar self-contracted curves to any dimension, and dispenses entirely with the continuity requirement. The proof borrows heavily from a geometric idea of [13] employed for the study of regular enough curves, and can be seen as a nonsmooth adaptation of the latter, albeit a nontrivial one. Applications to continuous and discrete dynamical systems are discussed: continuous self-contracted curves appear as generalized solutions of nonsmooth convex foliation systems, recovering a hidden regularity after reparameterization, as consequence of our main result. In the discrete case, proximal sequences (obtained through implicit discretization of a gradient system) give rise to polygonal self-contracted curves. This yields a straightforward proof for the convergence of the exact proximal algorithm, under any choice of parameters.