Bruxism anyone? (Clenching jaw at night)

In My Humble Opinion
1

Anyone else deal with this? If so, what methods of worked for you as far as making you stop?

I go through periods of clenching my jaw at night. It started (perhaps just coincidentally) back when I nearly lost my ear and ended up getting an otoplasty. I’m a side sleeper and with tender ears it was hard for me to sleep properly. I’m not sure if I started clenching then or just noticed it because I had such crappy uncomfortable sleeps.

Anyway, every now and then I go through phases where I have really vivid dreams, and I almost always end up waking up with headaches from clamping down. My dentist has checked it out, and it doesn’t appear that I’m grinding my teeth, just clenching my jaw. He’s hesitant to give me an appliance since I’m not grinding, because he said, people who clench only tend to clench more when they have something chompy to chomp on (er, that’s paraphrased).

I don’t clench usually, just during “busy dream season”.

2

I’m not sure I agree with your dentist’s assessment. I clench my teeth as well. I have for years. About 25 years ago my dentist fitted me for an appliance. He took an impression of my teeth and made a rubber thing to wear at night. Ultimately it broke the cycle and I didn’t have the problem for a while. I do now again, even during the day, but haven’t done anything about it.

3

I clench my teeth at night, too, and got an appliance to chew on. It seems to work in cycles: I wear the chew toy and for a few weeks my jaws are noticeably looser and more relaxed. After a while, I seem to start chewing on it and the problems come back. When I quit wearing it, relaxed jaws for a couple of weeks and then I start clenching again. Back to the chew toy. I’m going to see a jaw specialist soon, and hoping it’ll get me further.

With me I suspect it’s a habit I developed when I got braces. They made my teeth itch and hurt, and clenching “scratched” the itch. Unfortunately I didn’t quit clenching my teeth when the braces came off.

If I hear about any better solutions than chewing appliances, I’ll let you know.

4

I thought it wasn’t bruxism unless you were grinding your teeth. Anyway, I did it for years before I caught it, and by then it was too late: some of my teeth had already been ground down a bit, and got misaligned. It’s a real issue.

Apparently I’ve done it at least since my teens (I’m 53 now). I have no idea why I did it; it didn’t seem related to stress or anything else I could figure out. Interestingly, I only did it on the right side for some reason. A few people who saw it, though, said I really went to town. I even woke myself up once from the grinding noise. Yech.

5

That’s sort of why I suspect it started with my ears. I started clenching due to the discomfort. I actually remember having bad dreams involving ear pain and biting down against the pain in my dreams, waking up clenching in real life.

I’ll ask again about an appliance.

6

Depends where you get your definition. Wiki says “grinding accompanied by clenching” and a quick Googling shows other site saying “clenching often accompanied by grinding” other say “grinding or clenching.” I assume I grind a bit, but not enough for there tow be any significant wear on my teeth as a result. My jaw muscles on the other hand seem to be getting quite the workout.

7

I clench my teeth when I am under stress, it started when I was in law school. I didn’t have the money for a custom appliance so I just went to the sporting goods store and bought a kids’ mouthguard (I am a small person and one size fits all never fits me). It worked well. I lost it in the move and need to get another one as I have started clenching again, but I also have no evidence of grinding.

My husband on the other hand can be heard a room away when he grinds his teeth, and won’t get a mouthguard because he is vain. No, really. Well, he doesn’t say so but that’s what it amounts to. So vain he’s going to end up toothless, go figure.

Though it must be said that he has been doing it all his life(his mother said he did it when he had two teeth) and has no identifiable dental problems at 43. Which is a real problem for the dentist who keeps trying to talk him into one.

8

Lately I’ve been clenching my teeth at night and waking up with a headache. I have to think about relaxing my jaw before I go to sleep and that seems to help a bit. I haven’t figured out anything else yet, except that regular exercise seems to help.

9

Regular jaw exercise, or like running 10k? The latter I do, but I don’t do any mouth exercises other than snacking.

I don’t chew gum, for some reason that makes it worse.

10

Walpurgis, I’d definitely be interested in other solutions, because what I’ve got isn’t working too well.

Do y’all only clench at night? Because I’ve always done it during the day, too, until I catch myself and try to stop. It seems to be almost my “rest position”. When I’m stressed, it gets really bad.

I started having trouble (no grinding, just clenching) as a teen. I was constantly waking up with headaches and jaw pain. The dentist said I’d have to get a mouth guard.

I broke myself of the habit by sleeping with my tongue between my teeth, because I really, really didn’t want an appliance. (I also developed the weird ability to clench my jaw without touching my teeth together.)

A few years back when I finally broke down and got tested for sleep apnea and got a CPAP, the problem came back. I got the nasal pillows so I could put on my glasses without taking the whole thing apart if I had to get up at night (because I’m also blind as a bat) and a jaw-strap to keep my mouth closed - which brought on the clenching again.

So now I’ve got a mouthguard - which does seems to increase the jaw-clenching. The one I’ve got is some kind of hard, clearish plastic/rubber/something.

I did try OTC mouthguards before I sprang for the ‘official’ one. The athletic guard was extremely uncomfortable, so that didn’t work at all.

I got one of the ones they sell at the pharmacy counter, and it seemed to work better than the one I’ve got now. It was soft and squishy and seemed to act like a cushion between my teeth. Unfortunately, it only lasted for a couple weeks before I chewed through it.

I’m going to have to talk to my dentist again - he never mentioned the chompy-chomp increase. But if I don’t wear the damn thing these days, I clench so hard that I wake up with headaches and jaw/neck pain again, even after a couple-hour nap.

I tried the tongue thing again, but it didn’t work this time. I just wake up with a very sore tongue. :frowning:

11

I also think your dentist’s rationale is a bit…odd. Clenching your teeth is not innocuous; with the tremendous amount of force your jaws impart, your teeth can crack and craze. Even if he’s right and you do clench harder with an appliance, having it should more than suffice in attenuating the overall impact.

I’ve ground and clenched my teeth at night from a young age. Sometimes I’d wake up with little chips of tooth loose in my mouth, and my teeth have always been worn down a bit flatter than normal. I never even knew I was grinding my teeth. I didn’t make the connection until I started dating.

Anyway, I’ve used guards on both my top and bottom teeth for the past two years (I couldn’t use just the top or bottom because my opposing teeth would grind through the plastic too fast), and based on the pattern of wear I see now, it’s gotten a lot better. If the ones the dentist offers are too expensive, you can get specialized guards at CVS. They’re more comfortable than regular athletic mouthguards.

12

I clench but don’t grind–during the day and at night. During the day I can realize what’s happening and stop; nighttime is of course different.

The risk of this is that you can supposedly damage your temporomandibular joints, over time. Or so I’ve been told. My dentist monitors my jaw joints and says that if they begin to click, pop, etc, he’ll make me a mouthpiece specifically designed for this problem. It fits over a few teeth on top, and is positioned so that when you bite down with it in, all the pressure is on one of your lower canines. Apparently having so much pressure on one point makes the clenching painful, and trains you to stop doing it.

13

I do the “no-touch clenching” too. That’s part of my headache problem. My fiancee will wake me up if she hears my teeth squeaking together, but if I just clench my jaw muscles without my teeth touching, it’s silent, so she doesn’t wake up to wake me up.

I don’t normally clench during the day unless I’m learning something new and I’m bad at it. For example, my fiancee and I are taking ballroom dancing lessons because we want to do an upbeat, jazzy kind of thing for our “first dance” at our wedding. Boy howdy, do I suck! So I find I tighten my jaw into the no-touch clench when I’m concentrating on not tripping over my graceless feet. It’s kind of like the way some people stick their tongues out when they are really concentrating hard.

I don’t normally do it otherwise though (to my knowledge).

14

His assessment may have something to do with the no-touch clenching mentioned above which I do way more than biting right down. He is not the only dentist to tell me this either. He’s the third.

ETA: Oh, I just realized I did say “clamping down” in my OP. I should have mentioned the clenching without tooth on tooth contact.

15

Erm, I don’t know about your dentist. I’m speaking as a soon to be dental school student who works IN a dental school right now. People lie - I had a dentist years ago tell me I had six cavities. Six! My mother encouraged me to go to a dental school to have it checked out by people who wern’t for a profit - and darned if I didn’t have a single cavity. Same dentist never commented on my occasional clenching. Point being, people lie, and if he’s not equipped or it’s not profitable for him to give you a treatment, he won’t necessarily. I have a “splint” which I use only when I’m stressed out - I don’t ordinarily clench (I don’t grind).

Of course, IANAD, but I strongly suggest that you seek a second opinion from a oral and maxiofacial surgeon. You may need a referral, but they’ll take xrays and be able to see if you’re having jaw pain, and diagnose it from there. The dentist and fill the treatment suggestions that are given to you by an oral surgeon.

16

You may have typed that prior to my last post. This is the third dentist who has said an appliance wasn’t likely to help. And my dentist is really beyond reproach.

They have done the fancy x-rays, sending me to a “center for oral and maxillofacial surgery” because their clinic had a fancier x-ray machine that did a kind of panoramic shot of my jaw from ear to ear.

17

IF you have no tooth damage from clenching or grinding, AND wearing an appliance doesn’t stop you clenching or grinding, THEN an appliance makes no sense. However, many people wear down and/or crack their teeth with bruxism, so even if they keep clenching or grinding, an appliance is cheap preventive dentistry. And some people do interrupt the grinding cycle, as described above, by using an appliance.

If one of your significant issues with bruxism is jaw-muscle pain, I highly recommend the NTI-TSS appliance, which fits over only your front teeth. That way your back teeth can’t even touch, and even if you keep clenching or grinding, you can’t bear down nearly as hard. It’s generally not covered by insurance but at $200 it’s some of the best money I’ve spent on the problem. Not very many dentists offer them – I had to search for one.

The other fantastic thing I did was get a very thorough massage that included pressure-point work inside my mouth, directly on those jaw muscles. I got it back in 1998, though, and haven’t found anyone since then who does anything similar or even who has heard of such stuff. The one massage stopped my bruxism for two or three years in the middle of one of the most stressful periods of my life. Mind you, when I am “bruxing” my husband tells me it sounds like I’m crushing glass marbles in a vise; I am not a gentle case. I did turn regular appliances into squeaky toys, too, even the hard plastic custom-molded ones. I’ve put a lot of wear on my molars.

18

I clench, too, and found that appliances did not help.

What DID help was taking muscle relaxants. My ENT prescribed them for years, but I seem to have gotten over that phase. I used to get these awful headaches as a result of the clenching.

19

This is what is working for me best so far. There is a OTC drug here that contains a muscle relaxant, IIRC, you need a prescription in the U.S. for it. But I don’t want to have to take a pill every night which is why I’m wondering what other people do.

I will ask my RMT about massaging my face though. I haven’t tried that.

20

I used to clench my teeth. Turns out, I had a cap put on about 15 years ago and it wasn’t quite the right shape so I couldn’t actually touch my teeth together without clenching.

During th day, this was not an issue but, apparently, I really wanted my teeth closed when I slept.

When I switched to my current dentist, she noticed it, shaved it off a bit and the problem was solved. It was like a little miracle.