Nighttime Grinding and TMJ Pain: Understanding the Connection and How we can Help

You can’t imagine what happens every night when you’re asleep — every morning, you wake up with pain in your jaw joints, a headache, and difficulty opening and closing your mouth. It’s never a good start to the day.

It turns out there’s a direct connection between your sleep habits and your daytime symptoms, and it involves your teeth, jaw joints, and stress levels. You brux (clench and grind your teeth) during the night, causing excessive tooth wear and pain in your temporomandibular joints (TMJs), the hinge joints that connect your jaw to your skull.

At the dental offices of Shara Miller DDS in Miami, Florida and Midtown, New York, our expert team of dental providers understands the problems bruxism and TMJ dysfunction can cause, so we offer treatments to combat them. Here’s what you need to know about the relationship between grinding and TMJ pain and how we can help you get past it.

The signs and symptoms of TMJ dysfunction

Diagnosing bruxism is easy for a dentist. All you need to do is look at the pattern of excessive tooth wear in the molars, and you can see what’s responsible.

What’s harder to do is to connect the bruxism to the TM joint. For that, you need to note all the signs and symptoms of TMJ dysfunction, such as:

• Pain and tenderness in the jaw and joint
• Popping/clicking of the jaw
• Pain that feels like a toothache
• Earache or sounds of cracking in the ears
• Ringing or clicking sounds in the ears (tinnitus)
• A sense of fullness in the ears
• Headaches, including migraine attacks
• Blurred vision
• Tight, stiff, or sore jaw or neck muscles
• Muscle spasms in the jaw
• Facial pain, mouth pain, jaw pain, cheek pain, or chin numbness or tingling
• Swelling, pain, or a lump in the temple area
• Difficulty chewing
• Shoulder pain
• Locking/dislocation of the jaw (usually after opening mouth wide), called lockjaw
• Dizziness or vertigo

You may have one or two symptoms, or you may have multiple. Generally, the more you clench, the more — or more severe — the pain you feel in the joint.

Sometimes, your dentist may order an MRI of the TMJ to detect damage to the cartilage in the joint and to rule out other medical problems with similar symptoms, such as trigeminal neuralgia.

Stress, bruxism, and TMJ pain

Oral health specialists see too much stress and more aggressive personality types as causes of bruxism. Nervous tension, anger, pain, and frustration unresolved in the waking world make their way into your sleeping world. Bruxing is the physical way you eliminate that tension, but it takes a toll on your mouth.

Not only do you end up with tooth wear, but the muscles in the TMJ, which are responsible for controlling the motion of the jaw, get strained when you clench and grind over and over again. Clenching and grinding can lead to jaw pain and stiffness, sometimes to the point of lockjaw (mouth stuck in the open or closed position).

How we can help

We specialize in making customized mouthguards (sometimes called nightguards). This soft plastic appliance fits over the entire arch of your upper or lower teeth and acts as a barrier between them. There’s no way for the teeth to touch, let alone grind, with the mouthguard in the way. That, in turn, relaxes the muscles in your jaw joints and eases the pain.

It could help if you relieve the stress that causes the bruxing; you might want to see someone who offers cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

During CBT, a mental health professional helps you closely review how your thoughts affect your actions. CBT teaches you to unlearn negative thoughts and behaviors and adopt healthier positive thinking patterns and habits. The more resolved you are, the less likely you are to brux.

If your nighttime grinding is a pain in the mouth, it’s time to visit Shara Miller DDS to get treated. To schedule, contact us by calling one of our offices or booking on the website today.