You wake up with a sore jaw. Or someone who sleeps near you mentions, kindly, that you sound like a coffee grinder at 3 AM.
So you look it up, and every answer says the same thing. Get a night guard.
Then a fair question shows up. Does the guard stop the grinding, or does it just take the damage for you?
The short answer
A night guard does not stop you grinding. It protects your teeth while you do it.
Grinding starts in your nervous system, not in your mouth. The clinical name is bruxism, and it happens in your sleep, which is why you cannot decide to quit. A piece of acrylic between your teeth has no way to reach whatever is setting it off.
What it can do is take the wear that would otherwise land on your enamel.
That sounds like a letdown when you first hear it. It should not.
Enamel does not grow back. Once a molar is worn flat, every road forward is longer and costs more than a guard does.
What the guard is doing up there
Three things, all night, every night.
It takes the wear. The guard is softer than your teeth, so it gives up material instead of your molars. You can watch a guard get thin over a year and know that thinning would have happened to you.
It spreads the load. Without one, the force lands on whichever teeth happen to touch first. Usually that is two or three teeth taking everything.
A fitted guard puts your bite on an even surface, so nothing takes the whole load alone.
It gives the jaw joint a break. Not always, and not for everyone. But plenty of people tell us the morning headache eases off within a couple of weeks.
That is usually the joint and the muscles around it getting an easier night.
So what does stop the grinding?
Nobody has one clean answer, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
What we see most often is stress, and the grinding usually tracks it. Tax season, a move, a bad stretch at work, a new baby. It gets worse, then it settles.
Sleep quality comes into it too. If you are not breathing well at night, your body has ways of dealing with that, and some people clench through it.
If you snore, wake up tired after eight hours, or someone has noticed you stop breathing, say so at your visit. It is a different conversation and it is worth having.
Alcohol and caffeine late in the day make it worse for a lot of people. So do some medications. Neither of those is a reason to change anything on your own, but both are worth mentioning.
How to tell it is grinding and not something else
A few signs show up together.
- Your jaw is sore in the morning and loosens up by lunch.
- Headaches at your temples when you wake, not later in the day.
- Teeth that have gone sensitive to cold with no cavity behind it.
- Flat, shiny patches on the biting surfaces of your back teeth.
- A scalloped edge along the sides of your tongue, from pressing it against your teeth.
Morning is the tell. Pain that starts in the morning and fades points at the night. Pain that builds through the day usually points somewhere else, and we wrote about how to sort those apart in jaw pain, TMJ or grinding.
What about the ones at the drugstore?
The boil and bite guards are better than nothing for a short stretch, and if that is where you are starting, start there.
They do have problems. They are bulky, so a lot of people take them out at 2 AM without waking up properly. Heavy grinders chew through one in a few weeks.
And a guard that fits badly can nudge teeth over months, which is a slow expensive way to solve a cheap problem.
A custom one is scanned to your own bite and made at the thickness your grinding calls for. We adjust it in the chair until your bite lands evenly on it.
It does not come out at 2 AM, because it fits.
How long does one last?
Depends on how hard you go.
Some people are in the same guard after five years. Others wear through one in twelve months.
That second group is not doing anything wrong, and a worn out guard is not a failure. It is a measurement. It tells us how much force your teeth were taking before you had one.
Bring it to your checkups either way and we will look at the wear pattern with you.
What getting one involves
Two short visits. The first is a scan of your teeth, a few minutes, no trays of goop. The second is the fitting, where we check the fit and adjust it until your bite lands evenly.
Nothing gets drilled and nothing is numb. Most people are in and out inside half an hour both times.
If you want the detail on materials, thickness and what it costs, our page on a custom night guard in Chicago covers it.
Coming to see us
We are at 1908 N Western Ave in Bucktown, a short walk from the Western Blue Line stop. There is limited parking behind the building, so call ahead if you need a spot.
We are open Monday to Thursday from 9 AM to 5 PM, Friday until 3 PM, and Saturday mornings until 2 PM. The Saturday slots go first, so book those early.
Bring the sore jaw in and let us look at the wear. Book a visit and we will take it from there.
