Most people do not find out from themselves. A partner mentions the noise. A dentist points at the flattened edge of a molar and asks whether you have been under pressure lately. Or you wake up with a jaw that feels like you have been chewing all night, which in a sense you have.
Grinding and clenching is common, and it happens for a mix of reasons that vary from person to person. This page covers what is known about it, what your dentist can do, and where our programs fit next to that.
Start with your dentist
If you are grinding, a dentist is the right first call, not us. They can see the wear, tell you how far it has gone, and fit a guard that stops your teeth doing further damage to each other. That is a real job and it is not one anything on this site does.
Everything we make is designed to work alongside dental and medical care, not instead of it.
How people usually find out
There is no self-test for this, which is part of why people carry it for years without knowing.
The signs that send people to look it up are fairly consistent. Waking with a sore or tired jaw. Headaches that are there when you get up rather than building through the day. Teeth that have become sensitive to cold. A partner who has heard it. Sometimes an aching ear with nothing wrong with the ear. Sometimes just the flat, worn look of a tooth that used to have a ridge.
Any one of those has other explanations too. A dentist can tell you whether the wear pattern actually points at grinding, and that is worth more than a symptom list on a website, including this one.
Night and day are different problems
Grinding while asleep and clenching while awake tend to behave differently, and conflating them is why a lot of advice does not land.
The daytime version you can sometimes catch. People notice it during a difficult email, or in traffic, or halfway through a meeting. Once you know to look for it, you can put your teeth apart, and some people get a long way with nothing more than that.
The night version you cannot catch, because you are not there. That is the one people find frustrating, because every strategy that relies on noticing does not apply. It is also the version that does most of the damage, since there is nothing moderating the force.
What actually causes it
Here is where most articles on this subject overreach, so this section is deliberately careful.
Stress comes up in almost every conversation about grinding, and it is one of the things commonly associated with it rather than a proven single cause. Sleep and breathing problems get mentioned. So do some medications, alcohol, caffeine and recreational drugs. So does the way your teeth meet. For a lot of people it is more than one of these at once, and for some it is not clear.
You will find confident numbers online about what percentage of cases are caused by stress. We used to have one on this page. We have taken it down, because we could not stand behind the source.
What we would say is narrower. If you clench when you are under load, and you have been under load for a while, the clenching is part of a stress response that is running whether you are paying attention to it or not. That response is what these programs are built for.
The burnout version of this
There is a pattern worth naming because a lot of people recognise themselves in it and do not connect the two things.
Someone is coping. Work is heavy, home is heavy, and they are handling it, in the sense that nothing is visibly falling over. They are not walking around feeling stressed. They would tell you they are fine. And their jaw is locked solid every morning.
The body keeps holding the load whether or not you have consciously registered it. The jaw is one of the places that shows up first, partly because it is one of the strongest muscle groups you have and partly because nobody sees it happening. If that is familiar, the grinding is worth reading as information rather than as a dental problem alone.
Guards, and what they are actually for
A night guard gets a lot of unfair criticism from people trying to sell you something else, so it is worth being straight about it.
A guard protects your teeth. That is what it is for and it does it well. Enamel does not grow back, and if you are grinding hard enough to wear it down, stopping that damage is worth doing on its own terms. A dentist will fit one properly, which matters more than what it is made of. The chemist versions are cheaper and a lot of people find they do not stay put.
What a guard does not do is change the behaviour, because it was never designed to. That is a separate job and it does not make the guard less useful. Most people who grind need both things rather than a choice between them.
The things people try first
Worth a short honest word on each, because you have probably already done some of these.
Cutting caffeine after lunch, and easing off alcohol in the evening. Both come up often, both are free, and some people notice a difference. Winding down properly before bed rather than working until you close the laptop and lie down. Jaw and neck stretches, which help some people with the soreness. Warmth on the jaw muscles in the morning.
None of these are wasted effort, and none of them are aimed at the thing underneath. If you have done all of it and you are still waking up tight, that is not a discipline problem on your part. It is that the habit is not being run by the part of you that makes decisions.
Where Cognitive Pattern Reprogramming fits
Cognitive Pattern Reprogramming is guided audio. A session runs fifteen to twenty minutes, you listen wherever you have a quiet moment, and it is designed to work with the automatic response underneath habits like clenching.
It is designed to help shift that pattern. It does not protect your teeth, it is not a substitute for a guard, and it is not dental treatment. Results vary from person to person, and some people find the format does not suit them at all.
What you are committing to: a session a day, fifteen to twenty minutes, over several weeks rather than one listen. It can be used at any time of day and does not need to be at bedtime.
One full session, free for seven nights, no credit card. $29.95 a month after that, cancel any time.
Who made this
Rob Edmonds was nineteen and could not speak in front of a room. Not nervous, genuinely unable, and it was starting to cost him exams. He tried hypnotherapy because he had run out of other ideas, and a few sessions sorted it. It worked in a way that annoyed him slightly, because it should not have been that straightforward.
He went into business consultancy and finance first, where he watched capable people get held back by mindset far more often than by ability. Then he went and did it properly, training at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Sydney.
Cognitive Pattern Reprogramming came out of that. Short and practical rather than open ended. It is designed to help shift the response that is running now, instead of going back through what caused it.
He still sees clients one to one.
Reviewed by Rob Edmonds, who holds diplomas in Clinical Hypnosis and Strategic Psychotherapy and is a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Master Practitioner, and is a member of the International Strategic Psychotherapists Association and the Australian Society of Clinical Hypnotherapists. Creator of Cognitive Pattern Reprogramming and the MindShift Method, author of The MindShift Method: Cognitive Pattern Reprogramming. Rob practises in New South Wales, Australia.
Why now
Grinding does not get dramatically worse next Tuesday, which is exactly why people live with it for years. What it does do is accumulate. Enamel does not grow back, and the dental work that follows badly worn teeth is not cheap.
The question is not whether this is urgent. It is whether you want another twelve months of the same.
Frequently Asked Questions
For daytime clenching, sometimes, once you notice it happening. For night grinding, no, because you are asleep. That is the whole difficulty.
Ask your dentist. Usually yes. A guard protects the teeth from the grinding, which is a different job from changing the grinding.
It is commonly associated with grinding, not proven as a single cause, and for many people there is more than one thing going on. If you clench under load, the stress response is worth attention regardless of how much of the total picture it turns out to be.
No. Meditation is generally about attention. These sessions are structured around a specific pattern and are written for one thing at a time.
No. You listen while awake. People often listen in the evening, but the sessions are not designed to play while you sleep and they can be used any time of day.
Our programs are written for adults. Grinding in children is common and often settles on its own, and it is a conversation for your dentist or GP rather than something to work on from here.
Check with your doctor first. We are not in a position to tell you it is suitable for you.
One full session, free for seven nights, no credit card. That is enough to know whether the format works for you. After that it is $29.95 a month and you can cancel any time.