What Leads People To Grind Their Teeth?

So here’s how the hardness scale works in a nutshell: if one object can scratch another, the second object’s hardness is weaker than or equal to the first object. You can scratch a piece of limestone with a nail, but you’ll never scratch a nail with a piece of limestone.

So why does this fact matter? Because the hardest substance in the human body is enamel, ranking a five on the Mohs hardness scale and putting it above iron and steel. Of course, steel is still stronger than enamel in other ways and it can do a real number on your gums and bones, but that’s still very hard.

So why bring hardness up? Because two objects of equal hardness can scratch and grind each other, which means grinding your teeth can have some serious and permanent consequences. To protect your teeth, you might need to wear a mouth guard at night, and if it gets serious you might have to get a veneer or even an artificial crown to repair the damage. But what causes people to grind their teeth hard enough to reach this point?

• Stress. People can do some strange things when they fill up with stress and can’t find a way to relieve it, and that includes grinding teeth both while awake and while asleep.
• Chewing Gum Practice. When you spend all day every day with a piece of gum in your mouth, you can eventually train your jaw into clenching and unclenching constantly. While you can keep your mouth under control while you’re awake, it may turn into tooth grinding after you fall asleep.
• Sleeping Disorders. Sleep-related bruxism (the medical term for tooth grinding) can happen even if you have no stress issues. The jaw normally tightens up during sleep because it can block your airflow if it relaxes too much as you sleep on your back, but if it tightens too much it can start grinding your teeth together.
• Alcohol Before Bed. It’s hard to say how alcohol changes the way your jaw behaves, but tooth-grinding problems tend to get worse when alcohol enters the mix.

Tooth grinding most often happens during sleep, making it hard to say whether it’s happening. But if you constantly wake up with a headache or a sore jaw, that’s a good reason to ask your dentist to look for signs of bruxism. With so many causes there are plenty of solutions, and if nothing else works a mouth guard will keep your teeth safe from grinding no matter why it happens.