Being an adult is synonymous with waking up coerced, spending most of your day facing implacable strangers in exchange for being able to afford to return home with your loved ones and hopefully get some rest until it starts all over again as we wear out.
Although we know the importance of draining the stress from having an awful routine, a good part of that stress ends up accumulated in the mandible region, distributing it to the surrounding areas of the body and even influencing our emotions.
How does that happen?
Let’s put it this way: Are headaches, muscle tension, irritability, or insomnia uncomfortably familiar to your daily life?
If so, it means that you must find a way to free the temporomandibular bone from the tension to which bruxism disorder (teeth grinding) is subjecting it immediately, before both the ravages become irreversible.
The dangers of bruxism
As you may suspect, far from finding yourself in a rare situation, according to Market Reporter, 70% of the world’s population suffers from involuntarily tightening their teeth while asleep; but also during the day when concentrating on specific activities like reading, writing, driving or lifting heavy objects. On the other hand, it should be noted that during the last five years, the bruxism figures increased dramatically by 30%.
But what makes it so dangerous?
Orthodontists Dr. Fouad Ebrahim and Dr. Fatima Ebrahim – some of the leading exponents of the oral health industry in Canada – explain that compared to the average pressure of 60 pounds -which involves the act of chewing- teeth grinding can impose a force of at least 300 pounds to the jaw bone.
Regularly and for a long time, this activity ends not only by abrading the teeth, making them sensitive and breaking them but it also can trigger vertigo, loss of hearing and inflammation of the inner ear, among other difficulties.
Teeth health and depression
As we suggest in the title and description which opened the article, it is clear how the state of mind, the body and what surrounds you, impact each other; generating a chain of events that determine your life.
A perfect example could be:
Waking up “on the wrong side of the bed,” fighting with your partner before leaving home; being too distracted to notice you took the wrong route and now you’re stuck in traffic. Then arriving late at work, making you the creditor of migraine you will return home with, unable to fall asleep from so many worries.
Analyzing that scenario, at first glance, it seems like “there was no trigger” for all that, it was merely a bad day. However, according to the WHO, people with bruxism are more likely to have “bad days”; turning them into depressive cycles that threaten the balance between family, professional and mental health (and, ironically, increase the severity of bruxism).
This is one of the many reasons which orthodontics profiles as one of the most necessary practices of recent times according to WHO, and therefore, techniques such as those of Invisalign will be your primary resource (especially you have a history of Family Braces).
Invisible Orthodontic Treatment
Once you decide to go to the specialist (orthodontist), they will determine whether it is bruxism and check if there is any other problem (crossbite or poor dental alignment).
To correct any temporomandibular deviation in the case of bruxism, standard orthodontic treatments (splints) to avoid the involuntary shock of the upper and lower teeth cannot be used inside the mouth.
At this point, the world-famous Invisalign braces technology comes in. Being a state-of-the-art aligner (both removable and invisible piece made of silicone tailored to the patient), it is designed to correct the improper occlusion, at the same time definitively protects the teeth at all times.
Nowadays, with 4 million patients around the globe, more and more orthodontists are joining the specialized training to perform the Invisalign technique, while draws even more interest since the treatment provides results in a short period, having an immediate impact on the general welfare.
Recommendations
To close the article, we want to reinforce the fact that, although orthodontics is the definitive relief for people with bruxism, it is also possible to temporarily reduce the intensity of symptoms by avoiding hard or sweet foods, resorting to physiotherapy or applying ice / hot packs in the area – that’s while you schedule the appointment with the orthodontist.