Teeth grinding remedies

An online, crowdsourced and curated overview of treatments that can help with teeth grinding (bruxism). We hope cureteethgrinding.com gives you your 😊 back!

We grouped the treatments in the following categories (according to the taxonomy used in [1]):

💊Pills, meaning drug, food supplements,
🧠Psychology, eg. biofeedback tools,
🏃‍♀️Psysical therapy, eg. specific excercises,
🦷Plates, more specifically all kinds of mouth guards, mouth correction tools,
Others, including medical procedures.

Psychology

Bruxism is often associated with stress, with specifically emotional stress and anxiety to be the main triggering factor. To avoid bruxism, these causes must be dealt with. Possible remedies and techniques:

General stress reduction techniques, eg. meditation or mindfulness. BruxismAcademy offers multilingual courses
Biodynamic devices. Tools that monitor bruxism behaviour and inform the user when it occurs, eg. using vibrations or notifications on your smartphone. Examples of biodynamic devides are Jawsaver (in the form of smart earbuds), Grindcare (with a specific device), Jawsense, bytesense, BiteStrip, GrindAlert and others.

Pills

Drugs, stimulants, diets, can cause bruxism, or help you reduce the symptoms.

Reduce stress using drugs or supplements, eg. CBD oil
Reduce ☕ coffee intake or other stimulants like ecstasy and MDMA
🌊Stay hydrated, drink enough water
Check if your body is getting enough calcium and vitamin D . Use supplemnts if necessary source
Avoid certain (medical) drugs, like SSRIs
Avoid a too acidic diet (?? to be confirmed)
Use of muscle relaxants (eg. Norflex, to be confirmed) can help you

Physical therapy

Bruxism is caused by increased jaw-muscle activity, as such specific muscle orientated treatments like stretching, trigger point treatment, dry needling can help treat it.

Mouth excercices
Jaw excercises
HIIT excercises

Plates

Occlusal splints (aka ‘dental guards’) work by mechanically protecting the teeth. They typically do not reduce the bruxing activity itself. In specific cases, surgerly like Bite or Dental Corrections can be considered.

Others

Other options include:

👅Tongue surgery
💉Botox injections
👃Nasal dilators

Background

Contribute

This is a crowdsourced list. So if you have comments, additional tools, etc. share them with us. The following people have proposed changes: Fien, Katayoun Omrani, David Scott.

More importantly: if you like this webpage, share it! Like the project on GitHub, share it to your followers on your socials, or do a shootout to us. Thank you!

Interesting reads

[1] “Behandeling van bruxisme. De psychologische benadering”, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Tandheelkunde, https://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.168736 (in Dutch)