If you are one of more than 30 million Americans who has been told by your dentist that you grind your teeth, you might also have heard some of the horror stories of not doing anything about it. If nighttime grinding and clenching (bruxism) gets bad enough, the symptoms themselves are scary. Some people experience jaw pain, some experience neck pain, some experience tooth pain, some experience nerve and facial pain, some experience morning migraines, and some experience multiple kinds of pain. But if you are not in pain yet, you may not feel motivated enough to try the $700 mouth guard your dentist has recommended to you. You will be glad to know there are alternatives.
Tooth grinding and clenching is a habit, and what works to help one person kick the habit may not work for someone else. Just as there are many different things that different people find helpful in losing weight or quitting smoking, there are also a variety of things that different people find helpful in kicking the habit of nighttime grinding and clenching.
The one thing that all the possible ways of kicking the clenching and grinding habit have in common is that they are all ways of interrupting the normal cyclical neurological pattern of the habit of clenching and grinding. Here we will go over the top ten things that different people have found have had a significant effect, but remember, the order of this list is not the point. The variety is the point. It can help to try some of these things in combination together.
Mouth guards. Many people find the $10 to $50 mouth guards (available easily from Wal-Mart, local pharmacies such as CVS, or on the internet) work just about as well as a custom $700 mouth guard from a dentist. The good thing about trying an inexpensive mouth guard first is that if you turn out to be someone who grinds more with a mouth guard than without (not uncommon), you might want to learn this for only $20 rather than learning this for $700. The problem, in my opinion, with mouth guards
Chiropractic treatments. This can get expensive over time, but if you are someone who is lucky enough to have one or two chiropractic treatments alter how you feel enough so that the whole feel of your body is different, you might be fortunate enough to significantly alter your nighttime tooth grinding and clenching.
Biofeedback. Sleep lab biofeedback bedside units are expensive and hook up to you with a harness of wires stuck to your face, but recently self-contained biofeedback units to help reduce tooth grinding have become available at a price less expensive than a dentist-made mouth guard. These units are worn like a headband while sleeping, and they give an audio signal when you clench, allowing you to train yourself out of the habit of tooth grinding and clenching, even in your sleep.
Positive psychology. Tooth grinding is often associated with tension and anxiety. There are lots of possible ways to reduce anxiety, but how do you choose? It seems these days that there are more self-help gurus than you can shake a stick at, all promising to lead you down an easy path a better experience of life (some for the modest price of a book, and some for the price of a workshop costing hundreds or thousands of dollars).
What if a Harvard university professor put together a course offering the results of hundreds of research studies showing which of those positive psychology techniques really works, and showed you the proof of how well it works? What if you could take that course (that Harvard students pay thousands of dollars of tuition for) for free on-line. Well, now you can. Harvard University now has it’s famous undergraduate course on Positive Psychology available for free on line. This course covers the many great practices you can easily to in your own life that really lead toward less anxiety and a more joyful life. Most of these practices are amazingly simple, and most of us don’t know about or do many (or usually any) of them.
Hypnosis. Seeing that teeth and jaw clenching is largely a psychological habit, many believe that addressing the root cause or causes in the brain that are subconsciously leading to the action of grinding ones teeth. One proven method of dealing with and ultimately curing deep rooting psychological issues, such as this, is through hypnotism. There are actually some courses and programs out there that teach you how to hypnotise yourself in order to curb bad or harmful habits. Here is one such course on self hypnosis.
Improve your sleep surface. You don’t have to buy a $2000 mattress to drastically change what your bed feels like to sleep on. Mattress topper pads which change the feel of your mattress entirely can be purchased at places like Costco for as little as about $100, and if it doesn’t have a good effect for you, you can return it! Many people find that changing their sleep surface effects the amount of teeth grinding and clenching they do.
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