stop grinding my teeth

help i grind my teeth everynight. i have beautiful teeth, however they are starting to shift and wear down and i’ve chipped a corner edge. i find myself stressing sometimes over old stuff that i haven’t even been thinking of during the day, but some how at night when i’m grinding i find i thinking about old misfortunes, this being said i’ve tried doing yoga, meditation, etc etc it has helped somwhat, however i still wake up with headaches and pain in my teeth and jaw, please don’t suggest injecting botox as i think it sounds dangerous, i’ve see several women in my family use it with bad results. I’ve got a mouth guard and yes it helps, but i think not only misallignment of teeth affects, i think, it is a deeper issue for me than that. it is scarry because i can’t seem to control it. good luck to anyone out there with this problem as it is very annoying,painful and scarry.

that this has something to do with stress. I dunno. I’m not really stressed, but I do have nightmares. Not the kind of nightmares you get from watching scary movies, but the kind where things happen or when you’ve done something horrible. Those kind. Anyway. I wonder if that has something to do with it? My husband says maybe I should just get a mouth guard. I guess if I can’t figure out how to stop grinding my teeth then I’ll have to.

I went to a new dentist yesterday and told him about my grinding issue. He said my teeth didn’t look very worn at all to him. He could tell I had ground them in the past. But if they still aren’t very bad, it’s possible I’m not grinding them anymore. If I ever make it home again and have the money to spare, I’ll get one of the special mouth-guards. But in the meantime, he said I shouldn’t worry about it.

I’ve been doing this for a few years and it’s wearing my teeth away. When I first started my dentist said “it looks like the teeth of a typical final year PhD student” but I was only halfway through mine!

After I graduated I hoped it would stop, but my life hasn’t gotten any less stressful… I think I will try doing yoga classes to try to relax more.

i’m changing the name of this entry to “relax my jaw” because i’ve gotten better about the actual tooth grinding, but i find that my jaw is almost always clenched. i’m rather tired of this bad habit, and i’d like to kick it completely.

Whenever I find my jaws hurting, locking up, or clenching, I used choral exercises of massaging and loosening it up. Hope this helps anyone else ^__

It’s definitely about stress, so I’ve learned to do a bit of relaxation—herbal tea, meditation, listening to mellow music or nature sounds, etc. before bed each night. It does come back occasionally, but that just reminds me that I’ve fallen out of my bedtime routine and need to get back to it!

... I have messed up my teeth real good. Chronic clenching and some grinding have worn down my teeth and caused near-constant inflammation of the ligament that runs along under all the teeth on my lower jaw. That inflammation pushes my lower teeth up and causes extreme sensitivity in the nerves (like a cavity!).

I’ve had a nightguard for over a year and wear it 99% of the time but it doesn’t seem to help the habit – just protects the surface of my teeth at night.

I don’t know what to do. I’m just so stressed all the time. Argh!

This has to be up there with one of the worst habits I have, period. It started in my sleep somewhere around 7-8 years ago, at least I think. If I did it as a child I wasn’t aware of it and my mom had me at the dentist regularly so I think he would have said something if I did. Anyways, it’s now a bad habit that has carried over into my every day life and it’s pissing me off. I’m so unaware of it, I’m often finding myself having to stop, think, then physically move my jaw because it’s been clenched tight for who knows how long. I know it has everything to do with some sort of nervous habit, but I’m afraid of ruining my teeth! Sometimes I even try breathing through my mouth to offset the habit, but then I usually just forget and go back to breathing through my nose again. Maybe I need to wear a rubber band around my wrist to snap to get me to shake the habit, but then I’d just be picking up a nervous rubber band snapping habit? haha… seems hard to win. Either way, I really need to stop grinding my teeth.

Unfortuanetly the key to this one seems to be to sort out your life. Then the teeth stop worrying. The end!