I knew I was in trouble when the drill came out. “We’ve got an issue,” my dentist told me. “You’ve been clenching your jaw so hard you’re killing your tooth. Possibly multiple.” Killing?! Surely he was exaggerating: My dental records are historically cavity-free! And after a bout of COVID-era stress-grinding, I wear a night guard. “Pressure kills the nerve,” he explained, pointing at my X-ray and a cloudy molar interior. “You’ve been clamping down, probably at night, but also probably during the day. Were you aware of that?” Reader, I had a baby seven months before this conversation, and I read the news. Was I aware that I was tense? I sure was! I just didn’t think my teeth knew.
I’m not alone. Two partial crowns later, during a visit to my Los Angeles endodontist for the prescribed curative root canal required for a third, I learned that more and more patients are coming in with clenching and grinding calamities versus the traditional cavities that used to be the endodontist’s bread and butter. And then these patients are coming back. Since COVID, my endodontist had seen people cracking through fillings and crowns made out of material that’s supposed to be diamond-hard. He was considering offering masseter Botox injections to temporarily paralyze the largest jaw muscle for the worst repeat offenders. “I don’t think it’s a dentist’s place to give Botox, but I’m running out of ideas,” he told me.
In that, he is alone. It seemed that everywhere I looked, new businesses were cropping up to tackle the growing problem of our propensity to grin and bear it. A week later I was trying Emface, a high-intensity muscle-stimulation device that uses electromagnetic waves purportedly to retrain overactive facial and jaw muscles through a course of repeated sessions. What that looks like in practice is two stick-on pads attached to wires that cause your face to painlessly spasm for 20 minutes straight while you scroll on your phone. While I was lying there, a friend aware of my situation texted a link to a video of what appeared to be a woman being tortured but was in fact LeAnn Rimes getting her jaw worked on by a fascial maneuver coach. (These are experts in body work that targets the connective tissue which wraps around the body’s muscles and organs.) I watched the singer bawl hysterically in—I guess—relief while I twitched, supine, behind a scrim in a Beverly Hills store window. Perhaps this all sounds ridiculous? There was a time I would have thought so. But that was before. I emailed LeAnn’s fascia guy to see if they had any available slots. They did, but not many. “We’re shooting our new TV show!” a rep wrote back.
He wasn’t the only one who knew fascia. I enlisted sports medicine chiropractor Jenna Lagana, DC, for help. She specializes in performance rehab and has worked with multiple performing artists; singers, she told me, get jaw issues like baseball pitchers get elbow ones. Night guards intended to prevent grinding can sometimes compound clenching, she said. If presented with something to grip, even unconsciously, many jaws will. She assessed my situation manually: no clicking or popping or pain while chewing meant it wasn’t a joint problem, but my jaw muscles were tight and aggrieved from overuse—a soft tissue issue. She applied pressure at various points around my skull and shoulders and did a sharply painful but ultimately relieving maneuver inside the upper corners of my mouth to get the hyperactive muscles there to relax a bit.
