Teeth Grinding at Night? Here’s What Your Body Is Desperately Trying to Tell You
- Brainz Magazine
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Written by Sharon Clare, Clinical Hypnotherapist
Sharon Clare is an accredited Solution-Focused Clinical Hypnotherapist. She is the founder of Sharon Clare Hypnotherapy, which helps professional women overcome stress, burnout, and sleep struggles using neuroscience-backed approaches to rewire how they think, feel, and respond to life. She also specialises in easing fears of surgery.
Jaw clenching, grinding, and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) pain affect millions of adults, yet most people never talk about it. They wake with headaches, discover their jaw can’t open fully, or learn from a dentist that their teeth are wearing down. Many assume it’s “just stress.” Others don’t think of themselves as stressed at all. They simply know their jaw won’t relax, especially at night.
Bruxism and TMD are recognised medical conditions. The NHS describes bruxism as the involuntary clenching or grinding of the teeth, often linked to the body’s stress response. These patterns aren’t a choice or a behavioural weakness. They are automatic, brain-driven protection strategies, the nervous system’s way of holding on when life feels demanding or unpredictable. And just as the brain can learn to guard, it can also learn to let go again.
The jaw is part of the threat system
The jaw is tightly connected to the fight-flight-freeze response through the trigeminal nerve, one of the most powerful sensory, motor highways in the body. It links directly to brain regions responsible for fear, defence, and emotional memory, including the amygdala and brainstem.
When the nervous system senses threat, muscles all over the body prepare for action. The jaw tightens as part of a rapid protective response, brace, hold, stay ready. This reflex evolved long before language or logic, when surviving meant biting, shouting, defending, or suppressing sound to avoid danger.
In today’s world, the threats are different, deadlines, responsibilities, unresolved fear memories, but the jaw still responds as if danger is close. And because the body doesn’t receive a clear “threat is over” signal, those muscles never truly switch off.
Internalised stress: When you don’t feel anxious, but your body does
Many people with bruxism insist they “aren’t stressed.” And from the outside, they appear calm and resilient. They keep going, push through, get things done. They’ve learned to cope silently. Meanwhile, their nervous system operates on a constant low-level alert, subtle enough that they don’t notice it until their body forces the issue. Studies show that physiological hyperarousal, even without conscious anxiety, can manifest in muscle tension and oral symptoms like clenching or spasms.
In my clinical practice, I often see people whose first real sign of stress shows up in the jaw. They may experience painful spasms or suddenly notice they cannot open their mouth fully. Sometimes a dentist detects restricted jaw movement, inflammation, or wear patterns and refers them to their GP. In severe cases, they’re told the tension could lead to surgical intervention if it continues.
Only then does the question arise: “Why is my body doing this when I feel fine?” Because you can feel fine yet still be physiologically in fight/flight. Your body remembers effort your mind has learned to ignore.
Night-time grinding: Stress rehearsal in sleep
Bruxism often occurs during REM sleep, when the brain processes emotion and consolidates memories. Normally, the motor system is inhibited to keep the body still. But when stress chemistry is elevated, the inhibition is incomplete. The jaw acts out the body’s internal “rehearsal” of stress, clenching, grinding, guarding.
This is why people wake unrefreshed even after a full night’s sleep. The nervous system has been working hard all night. Not solving problems, preparing for imagined danger.
Why standard advice often doesn’t solve jaw clenching
When people finally ask for help with teeth grinding or jaw tension, the advice they receive usually sounds practical, try to relax your jaw, stop chewing gum, wear a mouthguard, reduce coffee, notice when you’re clenching.
These tips can protect your teeth or temporarily ease symptoms, but they rarely solve the problem. For many people, they make it worse.
Here’s why.
Bruxism and TMJ tension begin in the subconscious nervous system, not in the teeth or the thinking brain. The primitive brain has learned that jaw tightness equals safety. So, when you are told to constantly monitor your jaw, is it tense now? What about now? You inadvertently draw attention to it. The brain interprets attention as importance, and importance as potential danger.
The more you watch the jaw, the more the nervous system believes it must stay alert. It’s not stubbornness. It’s protection.
This is also why mouthguards only go so far. They defend the enamel, but they don’t change the message coming from the amygdala, the emotional alarm centre. The body keeps running the same survival programme while the device absorbs the consequences. Many of my clients arrive saying, “I’ve tried everything, the mouthguard isn’t working anymore.” And that’s because the root cause is neural, not dental.
Jaw tension isn’t corrected by control. It’s corrected by safety.
The neuroscience of letting the jaw release
The jaw only relaxes when the nervous system feels secure enough to stand down. Two systems are involved:
The intellectual brain (which can understand there is no threat)
The survival brain (which reacts as if threat might come back)
When these two parts disagree, the survival brain wins. Every time. That’s why you can tell yourself you’re fine, while your jaw tightens anyway. To truly unlearn bruxism, the nervous system must receive repeated experiences of genuine calm. Not forced relaxation, not monitoring, not “fixing it,” but internal evidence that life is safe again. That happens through:
Physiological reset: Breathwork, deeper sleep, parasympathetic activation, these lower adrenaline and cortisol, allowing jaw muscles to release their defensive hold.
Changing the meaning: When people stop blaming their body (“What’s wrong with me?”) and shift toward understanding (“My jaw has been trying to protect me”), stress chemistry drops. Shame fuels tension. Self-compassion softens it.
Subconscious learning: In trance states used in Solution-Focused Hypnotherapy, the emotional brain and body communicate directly. New, calmer responses are rehearsed until they become the default. The brain begins predicting comfort instead of danger, and the jaw responds automatically.
Related: Why nervous system regulation is becoming the ultimate leadership advantage in the age of AI
What recovery feels like
Change often begins quietly. You notice yourself waking without that familiar stiffness, the jaw sitting a little softer instead of clamped tight. Morning headaches become less frequent. Your mouth opens more easily, the joint no longer protesting every movement.
During the day, you realise you’re working, talking, and concentrating without that tight grip creeping in. Sleep deepens, the kind of rest where you wake feeling like you have actually been off duty. Even the shoulders and chest, long used to bracing, start to feel lighter, as if the body is remembering a more natural shape.
It isn’t just that the pain fades. You begin to feel more like yourself again, not the version of you who gets through the day, but the one who feels safe in it. That’s what happens when the nervous system finally learns: there is no danger here anymore. Jaw tension doesn’t let go because you fight it, it lets go when it knows it can.
When the body stops guarding against the past, space opens for the present. And in that space, calm becomes possible again. Confidence grows. Control returns, the real kind, the kind that doesn’t have to be clenched. The jaw that once held on can learn to rest. And you get your life back, one safe, easy breath at a time.
Read more from Sharon Clare
Sharon Clare, Clinical Hypnotherapist
Sharon Clare is an accredited Solution-Focused Clinical Hypnotherapist specialising in mindfulness and stress management. She combines her expertise with decades of leadership experience in the NHS and not-for-profit sector to support her professional clients. Leading a social care organisation through COVID was an immense responsibility that deepened her understanding of stress and resilience, She also has a passion for helping people overcome fears around surgery and medical procedures. She volunteers at her local cancer care centre. When she's not helping others, Sharon can be found sea swimming year-round on the beautiful Northern Irish coast, a ritual that continues to keep stress at bay. Her mission is helping women thrive.
