If you grind your teeth, you may have been told that you should wear a mouth guard (also called a night guard). What you probably haven't been told is that while wearing a mouth guard can definitely protect your tooth enamel from being worn down by tooth grinding, having a mouth guard in your mouth may actually increase the amount of tooth grinding and clenching you do in your sleep, and there are many teeth-grinding-related problems besides worn tooth enamel that mouth guards can make worse.
Many people don't realize that TMJ pain, migraine headaches, neck pain, and ringing in the ear (tinnitus) all often stem from nighttime teeth grinding and clenching (bruxism). These other symptoms don't come from tooth enamel being worn away. They stem from the stress that the muscle activity of tooth grinding and clenching puts on your jaw joint, your jaw, the roots of your teeth, and your skull. If you happen to be someone who grinds more with a mouth guard than without, then you will wind up in worse pain when you use a mouth guard.
So you can see that if you are a person who instinctively grinds and clenches more when you have a mouth guard in your mouth, you may put yourself in serious pain and do serious long term damage to yourself by regularly wearing a mouth guard. Even if you do not regularly experience pain from your nighttime clenching and grinding, it can cause long-term cumulative damage which can lead to long-term TMJ pain.
Fortunately there is a way you can find out whether wearing a mouth guard increases the amount of clenching and grinding you do in your sleep. EMG measurements such as the ones used in sleep labs can measure how much tooth grinding and clenching you do in your sleep. Until recently, to benefit from EMG measurements, you had to go to a sleep lab or spend thousands of dollars on a home EMG monitor and sleep with a bunch of wires glued to your face. But now you can wear a light, comfortable electronic EMG-measurement headband such as the SleepGuard unit available form Holistic Technologies.
At the end of a night's sleep the SleepGuard unit will allow you to read out the total number of times you clenched, and the total number of seconds of clenching. Since all tooth grinding includes clenching, the SleepGuard headband will allow you to compare the amount of tooth grinding and clenching you do with a mouth guard and without a mouth guard. Not only that, but Holistic Technologies will let you try it free for three weeks, and if you use it in biofeedback mode, you can even use it to help you kick the teeth grinding habit.
