Why you are clenching your jaw, and what can be done to help:
We use our mouths and jaws all the time to speak, eat and even to manage and cope with stress. Sometimes we clench our jaws so tightly that pain spreads through our neck, head, face, chest and back. Clenching our jaws is an extremely common thing, so do not be alarmed! There are a lot of reasons why we clench our jaws but the most prevalent one is due to our emotional state, particularly stress and anxiety. There are several things that your osteopath can do to help improve your jaw clenching and assist with the pain:
- Hands on treatment:Â your osteopath can utilize a wide range of techniques to aid in helping improve your jaw pain, surrounding inflammation and help improve clenching and motor function through your jaw.
- Exercises: your osteopath can show you several exercises that can help with your clenching and jaw pain. Here are several that can help: …
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- Advice and education:Â knowing the structures that are causing your clenching, why you are clenching, what can be done, how to best manage the pain and clenching and healing time frames are all things that your osteopath can share with you to help best manage your clenching and jaw pain.Â
Tight neck after clenching your jaw?
There are a lot of reasons why your neck may feel tight. This could be due to injury, prolonged poor posture, muscular or joint dysfunctions. But have you ever considered the jaw when your neck is tight or vice versa? Having high levels of tightness in your neck and shoulder muscles can correlate with high levels of jaw dysfunction. The same can be said with our muscles of mastication (or chewing). When they are extremely tight – due to stress, anxiety or a TMJ dysfunction – this can also lead to a tight neck. Your osteopath can help you with several things to help the neck tightness:
- Hands on treatment: treating the surrounding area can help lessen neck and jaw pain, improve motion and mobility through these areas and reduce inflammation.
- Exercises: prescribing exercises to help take tension off the neck and jaw, improve motion through these areas as well as strength, are things your osteopath can do to help your condition. Here are several exercises that may help reduce tightness through the neck:
- Advice and education: know exactly what might be causing the tightness, how long it might take you to heal, what can be done to best manage your condition and why the clenching or tightness may be causing the tightness or dysfunction through the other area are all things your osteopath can provide to help best manage your condition.
