Grinding Your Teeth at Night? A Little Gratitude Might Help

According to some estimates, as many as 95% of Americans will, at some point, have a problem they might never notice — they grind their teeth together at night. Often, the only way someone will notice the problem is if their spouse tells them or if they wake up with an aching jaw.

There are a variety of potential causes that range from the disturbing and highly improbable (parasites in your jaw muscles) to the commonplace and widely accepted (stress in your life). Let's assume in this case that the trigger that makes the most sense to us today — that stress makes you grind your teeth in unconscious frustration at night — is the one that needs the most attention.

What you've just said, essentially, is that reducing stress can improve your dental health by eliminating the grinding problem. Well, there's a lot of advice out there about reducing stress — and almost every modern expert on the subject will tell you that being grateful for the good things in your life is one of the best ways to do it

It doesn't matter if you're grateful to God, grateful to the other people in your life, or simply abstractly counting your blessings, taking a few minutes to consciously acknowledge that you have good things in your life and expressing gratefulness for those things in whatever way best suits you is an amazing way to reduce stress — and thus, if you're a nighttime grinder, reduce the damage you're doing to your teeth as you sleep.

There are several other studies that link a less-stressed, more-grateful life to a systemic boost in overall health, which can in turn improve your oral health, but we wanted to give you at least one cause-and-effect sort of way in which simple gratitude can directly improve your oral health. It's a powerful thing, gratitude — we encourage all of you to use it.