How Stress Affects Your Teeth and Gums: Coping Mechanisms for a Healthier Smile

Ready to tackle your stress and protect your oral health? In this guide, we’re breaking down the link between stress and oral health problems and offering some practical advice for lowering stress so you can protect your smile. And if stress is just a part of your life at the moment, we’ll share some tips on how to protect your teeth in the meantime.

How does stress impact oral health?

Before we delve into stress-busting techniques or offer recommendations on how to limit damage, we first need to understand how stress can impact oral health. Stress can influence your oral health in a number of ways:

• Stress can lead you to clench your jaw at night time. Your jaw can exert incredible force, and this force is absorbed by your teeth and the supporting structures. This can lead to premature wearing of the teeth, stress fractures and chips. Not to mention, the force can also leave you with considerable pain in your jaw. Jaw pain can then translate to headaches during the day, which might seem unrelated, but are actually linked to stress and grinding your teeth.

• Stress can make you more likely to snack between meals. When we are stressed, we often reach for food that is high in calories, which could include comfort food, sugary snacks or starchy food. This is a simple evolutionary response designed to help us have enough energy to get away from scary situations. Modern sources of stress are more likely to be work-related or linked to your relationships, so we no longer need the energy to run away from a lion or a bear. But this behaviour persists, and it means that our teeth are vulnerable to decay due to poor dietary choices.

• Stress can interfere with our daily routines. This could mean that we are more likely to forget to brush our teeth, which can lead to a dangerous build up of plaque and bacteria.

Reducing stress in your life

It could be that the sources of stress in your life aren’t going anywhere any time soon. For example, if your children are struggling in school or you’ve started a new job with higher stakes than you are used to. In this case, it’s not so much about reducing sources of stress but reframing stress so that it doesn’t have a negative impact on health.

Breathing exercises might not seem like much, but they have the ability to change the chemical composition in your brain, which can have a huge impact on how you respond to stress.

Doing more exercise can also help you to reduce stress in your life by elevating levels of stress-busting hormones including endorphins, dopamine and serotonin.

How to protect your teeth from stress-related damage

Alongside reducing sources of stress, reframing how you feel about stress and increasing activities that actively combat stress, there are also things you can do to protect your teeth.

Get a mouth guard

If you grind your teeth at night, you can protect them with a mouth guard. This is a custom-fitted apparatus that is safe to wear while you sleep. It can help to position your jaw so that you don’t grind your teeth while you sleep. It can also protect your teeth from damage by providing some cushioning between the teeth so they aren’t grinding against each other.

Grab some healthy snacks

If you feel peckish during the day, be prepared with some healthy snacks. Fruits and veggies will be far better for you than chocolate and sweets. Being prepared with some healthy snacks will satisfy your need to graze throughout the day without exposing your teeth to lots of harmful sugar and starch that will stick to your teeth and damage the enamel.

Don’t skip dental checkups

You might be feeling stressed and busy, but don’t let this become an excuse to miss dental checkups. Regular dental checkups can help you to stay on top of the issues caused by high stress levels, so you can be confident you aren’t harming your dental health.

Ready to tackle stress-related dental problems? Get in touch with our team today to learn more about how we can help you protect your teeth during periods of high stress.