Jaw Pain & Tooth Pain – The Stress Connection
When we are under a lot of stress, we hold a considerable amount of tension in our muscles, mostly without realising it.
One of the craziest facts about muscle clenching is that many people clench their jaws enough to wear their teeth out on one side without even knowing. For many of these people, after years of jaw clenching, they first become aware of the habit when their partner tells them they can hear their teeth grinding while they sleep. For others, the first time they become aware of their clenching habits is when they develop stress-related jaw pain or tooth pain.
When we feel stressed it is not very common that we are able to clearly define what the feeling is; of course, in reality, it’s not the stressful events that we feel but the ways that our body reacts to them. Our bodies react to stress primarily by becoming tense and tight in the muscles. No doubt these are primitive protective reflexes that relate to the body’s’ fight or flight‘ or ‘freeze responses’.
For some reason, the majority of the tightening and clenching that we do in response to stress and anxiety happens in the shoulders, neck and jaw. These muscle groups and their associated joints can sustain a massive amount of microtrauma over time when exposed to persistent stressors, as indicated by the more visible wearing down of tooth enamel that dentists so commonly identify.
Stress and anxiety can cause pain via damage to the structure of the tooth itself and it can also cause tooth pain through damage to the root of the tooth caused by all the clenching of jaw muscles. In addition, many sufferers of stress and anxiety develop pain in the muscles of the jaw and in the temporomandibular joint. If you suddenly develop pain and have been living with high anxiety or stress levels, it is entirely possible that the stress has caused this.
For people who suspect that they have stress induced jaw/tooth pain, the dentist is the obvious first stop. Dentists are used to dealing with these types of issues as they are extremely common, just as anxiety and stress are extremely common.
The first step your dentist will take is establishing whether your tooth or jaw has been causing your pain. It can be surprisingly difficult to tell by yourself which is which due to how complicated the nerve pathways are in your mouth and face. If you have some damage to the tooth caused by stress, the dentist will be able to repair that for you. If your dentist sees apparent signs of extreme clenching and no damage to the teeth, they will most likely conclude that the pain must be coming from the jaw.
The dental approach to tooth pain and jaw pain caused by stress is to provide you with a mouthguard to wear at night. A nocturnal mouthguard reduces the amount of force that you can put through your jaw when you clench at night. This approach has helped many people prevent tooth pain caused by clenching, as well as jaw pain.
The limitation of this approach to stress-induced pain is that it leaves you still clenching, and it still leaves you with stress and anxiety. So while the dentistry was helpful and important, it has not worked on the underlying cause of jaw and tooth pain .
The first step your dentist will take is establishing whether your tooth or jaw has been causing your pain. It can be surprisingly difficult to tell by yourself which is which due to how complicated the nerve pathways are in your mouth and face. If you have some damage to the tooth caused by stress, the dentist will be able to repair that for you. If your dentist sees apparent signs of extreme clenching and no damage to the teeth, they will most likely conclude that the pain must be coming from the jaw.
The dental approach to tooth pain and jaw pain caused by stress is to provide you with a mouthguard to wear at night. A nocturnal mouthguard reduces the amount of force that you can put through your jaw when you clench at night. This approach has helped many people prevent tooth pain caused by clenching, as well as jaw pain.
The limitation of this approach to stress-induced pain is that it leaves you still clenching, and it still leaves you with stress and anxiety. So while the dentistry was helpful and important, it has not worked on the underlying cause of jaw and tooth pain.
Once you have gone through the process of successfully treating this pain, you should then want to resolve the stress that caused the pain itself. To do this, you will be looking to treat the brain and nervous system.
Classical talk therapy’s like counseling, hypnotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy can all be highly effective ways to reduce stress in the face, neck and jaw muscles. And by extension reduce tooth and jaw pain. However, many more modern and therapeutic approaches to stress and anxiety are emerging like EMDR and brainwave entrainment. More and more people are choosing these types of therapies to manage not only their stress and anxiety but also secondary problems like tooth pain caused by bear stress and anxiety.
Not only are therapies like EMDR and brainwave entrainment useful, many people prefer them because they don’t involve the same amount of talking about your problems to a stranger, they can also bring faster reduction in stress and anxiety symptoms for many people.