Grinding your teeth together or clenching your jaw muscles without realizing that you’re doing it is called Bruxism. Most of the time this happens at night during sleep. More rarely it happens while awake during the day.
The most common reason for night time teeth grinding is stress. When people go to sleep with a lot of anxiety, their jaw muscles tend to tense up and then the grinding starts. Sometimes dreaming can cause tension in the jaw muscles and grinding. There are other causes, but these two are the most common.
In the short term, problems that can arise from bruxism are sore jaw muscles, toothache, headache, a tired feeling. In the long term, it’s possible to do serious damage to your teeth. You can get chips in your teeth, you can flatten your teeth out and literally file them down, and you can cause an extreme sensitivity to hot and cold.
To relieve the effects of bruxism, there are a couple of things you can do. One is to buy and use a night guard. This is simply a device that covers your teeth and protects them so that the grinding doesn’t effect them. Another approach you can take is to employ certain lifestyle changes such as doing certain exercises before bed that will reduce your tendency to grind your teeth.
Regardless of which approach you take to controlling your bruxism problem (or if you use some combination of approaches), you’ll feel much better and your teeth will be healthier is you canlearn how to stop night teeth grinding.
To read more about the exercises and techniques to control bruxism, check out “<a href=”http://www.squidoo.com/How_To_Stop_Night_Teeth_Grinding”>How To Stop Night Teeth Grinding</a>”.
