Hi Everyone and welcome or welcome back to my YouTube channel. My name is Priya Mistry
and I'm the TMJ doc. Today's video is going to be about how to stop clenching or bruxing your teeth,
at least during the day. Many of us clench or we brux our teeth all day long
and this can generate an enormous amount of force, and all of that muscle recruitment,
all of that force - it can lead to jaw pain, headaches, neck pain, ear pain, teeth fracturing,
and more! If you watch this video until the end, what I'm planning to do is give you some tools,
some tips, some tricks to help you stop or limit clenching or bruxing activity during the day.
For those of you who don't know me, i'm a General Dentist with a practice in Portland, Oregon where
we are dedicated to taking care of patients with TMJ Disorders. I work here with my wonderful
mentor, Dr. Arthur Parker. If you haven't already, be sure to check out my Instagram! I post here
quite frequently with lots of information on TMJ Disorders, so if you like to geek out on TMJ stuff
like I do, I think you'll find that Instagram page quite informative! So let's get into the
meat of this video! For those of you who are aware of clenching and bruxing during the day, that
means you're probably doing it at night too! If you're doing it during the day when you're awake,
when you're aware of what you're doing - you're definitely doing it when you're asleep. The
reasons behind clenching and bruxing are vast and they're varied and they're linked to obstructive
sleep apnea, stress, emotions, misaligned teeth, postural discrepancies, and more!
Treating that underlying cause, what's driving that clenching and bruxing is always something
that I would definitely recommend.. so learning how to manage your stress and your emotions,
finding out if you have obstructive sleep apnea with a sleep test, visiting a physical therapist
to look for postural discrepancies, seeing your dentist and talking about misaligned teeth,
etc. - I would definitely recommend all of those! So treating that underlying cause is so important!
This video today however, is just focused on limiting or stopping clenching or bruxing activity
during the day. The method that I've recommended to many of my patients, and I found that it works,
is simply to set a timer on their phones to go off every 20 minutes during the day.
And that's going to be annoying, especially if you're trying to get work done which most of us
are. Having said that, when that timer goes off, stop and check where your teeth are. If
you find yourself clenching together or bruxing your teeth together, stop, close your eyes,
take a deep breath, and remind yourself - say a little mantra: "do not clench or grind,
do not clench or grind". And do that.. so do that every 20 minutes for about a week. Have that timer
go off. You're training yourself to stop doing this during the day. After about a week or so,
you can change that timer to every 30 minutes. Let another week go by - every 40 minutes,
another week - every 50.. you get the point.. until you really get to a point where you don't
catch yourself clenching or bruxing during the day at all. So i know it sounds like a
lot of work and it might be kind of annoying to have that timer going off all the time,
but I have seen this method work effectively with my patients. One patient even went so far as to
every time she caught herself clenching every time she caught herself bruxing,
she had a rubber band on her wrist and she would - Boom! - snap herself. So she gave herself sort of
a punishment for doing that. She gave herself negative reinforcement and it worked! She has
stopped clenching, she has stopped bruxing during the day. Again, this is training yourself to stop
a habit to stop a noxious habit and I firmly believe that we can train ourselves to stop doing
this during the day. Nighttime - it's a little bit of a different story, but again we're talking
about the day in this video. So try this out; I know it's definitely helped my patients. I've seen
it be successful. Another thing that you can do is seek out an experienced TMJ Physical Therapist
in your area. These TMJ Physical Therapists often have different ways to help decrease
or stop or limit clenching and bruxing activity during the day. These methods can include using a
biofeedback machine - where basically they hook up monitors to your facial muscles - and these
monitors can let you know when these muscles are firing, when they're firing the most,
which postures you can assume to calm that muscle activity down. The biofeedback and postural
changes are pretty amazing. They can also recommend some breathing exercises and really get
to the root of why you're clenching and bruxing and what's driving that activity. TMJ Physical
Therapists can be especially beneficial to help limit and and stop this activity. So that's really
it, my friends. It's pretty basic. If you like what you heard or you learned something new,
click "Like" below, SUBSCRIBE to my channel, do all the things, ask any questions,
reach out! I'm always happy to answer, and remember - you can never have TMI about TMJ!