Teeth Grinding Treatment often requires the use of nightime mouthguards. Although these guards to manage to prevent the damage caused to your teeth and can help you sleep a bit better, they do have their own drawbacks.
For example, for the single amongst us, when is a good time to tell the girl or guy that you’re dating that you need to put a mouthguard in at night? Not exactly sexy is it.
And for all of us, when is a good time to forget to take it with you on holiday? Answer – never! I recently went away on holiday for just 3 nights and, as I was backpacking, thought that I’d be able to sleep without my mouthguard for at least that long. But boy was I wrong – I would end up having to bite into the sheet at night just to try and stop my teeth grinding and give me some kind of relief.
So I’ve been investigating ways to prevent teeth grinding permanently and without a mouthguard, and there seem to be a couple of options now that can mean that you won’t need to sleep with a nightguard for the rest of your life.
The first of these are mouthguards that “retrain” your mouth. Basically it seems they force your jaw apart a little more than a normal stop grinding mouthguard, and that this somehow weakens the muscles involved. After a couple of weeks they say most people should be able to sleep without a mouthguard once again.
The other option I’ve found is a few guidebooks that claim to be able to stop your teeth grinding naturally – i.e. without a mouthguard. Having had to wear a mouthguard myself for a number of years now, the idea of having to get used to a new one really didn’t make me smile – even if it was only going to be for a couple of weeks (plus which, they were awfully expensive). But the thought of somehow being able to cure my bruxism without the need for a nighttime mouthguard was much more appealing.
How would it work I wondered?
Well, it turns out one of the main reasons that we grind our teeth so much in our sleep in the modern world is that we have forgotten the art of getting a good night’s sleep. Too many of us go to bed still stressed and with tension in our bodies, and this manifests itself through the tension in our jaw that leads to us grinding our teeth.
So one of the key things these kind of guides focus on is getting a proper relaxing night’s sleep.
Another area they focus on is releasing the tension from our jaw. This is as simple as doing some nighttime exercises before we go to sleep and when we wake up. It seems obvious really – but by releasing the tension from our jaw, you release the physical tension that forces out teeth to grind against each other during the night.
The final aspect to this kind of teeth grinding treatment is to do with nutrition – yes, ensuring we eat a better diet, and with the assistance of some dietary supplements we can complete the final step in our natural cure for nighttime teeth grinding – and that is the simple answer on how to stop grinding teeth.
These really seem quite like easy and achievable ways to help stop grinding teeth while sleeping.
I’ll report back soon with an update!
