Bruxism

Bruxism refers to the grinding or clenching of the teeth. Bruxism is also known as teeth grinding. You grind or clench your teeth unintentionally many times in the night.

Many people grind their teeth in sleep but some of them grind their teeth in day time also. Many of them are not aware of their bruxism.

Your family members who sleep with you informs about your bruxism as they are disturbed with the sound caused by grinding the teeth.

Children grind their teeth in early ages but leave the habit of grinding when they enter into adult stage. But for some children, bruxism continues. Adults also grind their teeth in sleep due to many physical, psychological and stressful conditions. Often adults and parents of children neglect bruxism and think that this is normal condition.

Nobody wants to know the seriousness of bruxism until it affects the health. Grinding the teeth is not chewing something but applying pressure on your teeth especially back teeth and is associated with forceful jaw movements.

As you are forcing on the jaw movements, your teeth get rubbed. The force of clenching and grinding causes pressure on the muscles, tissues and other structures of jaw and your teeth gets damaged.

Grinding teeth means sliding your teeth over each other in side ways. It is done in such a way that the molar tooth gets damaged and results in pain. Sleep bruxism is a bigger problem and it is difficult to control.

If bruxism occurs in day time, you can control yourself or you can control your child. But as it mostly occurs at night, you are not aware of teeth grinding until your partner recognizes or you are not aware of your child grinding the teeth at night.

In adults, bruxism mainly occurs due to stress. They face stress at home, at work place and outside. When they go to sleep, they don’t forget about the stressful situations which they faced in the day time. They also think about the next day problems in the night only.

This leads to severe stress and tensions and leads to teeth grinding. Adults grind their teeth if they experience pain with other health problems, or with anger or with frustration.

Children grind their due to the problems facing at school. They may be worried about the marks, exams, and home works. When children go to sleep, they think about the exams, how to get through the exams, how many marks they get, or quarrel they had with other friends. These are the main stressful conditions for children to suffer with teeth grinding.

You can identify bruxism if you have pain in the jaws, if you have damaged teeth, if you find broken teeth, headaches, if there is cosmetic damage of the teeth, if you have sore facial muscles, fractured teeth, earaches or damage to the temporomandibular joint.

Some of the bruxism symptoms can be identified by you and if you get doubt that you have bruxism or your child is suffering from bruxism, you consult a dentist. A dentist examines the teeth and confirms whether it is bruxism or not.