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Bruxism and Hypnotherapy: An Holistic Approach to Stop Teeth Grinding

Updated: Oct 12, 2025




When Your Jaw Carries What Your Mind Can't Hold


You wake up with a headache again. Your dentist mentioned tooth wear at your last checkup. Your partner says you grind your teeth at night, though you have no memory of it.


Bruxism (chronic teeth grinding and jaw clenching) operates outside conscious awareness. Most people only discover they have it through its consequences: damaged teeth, jaw pain, disrupted sleep, morning headaches.


What makes bruxism particularly challenging is its invisibility. The grinding happens during sleep or as an unconscious habit during the day. By the time symptoms appear, the pattern has often been present for months or years.


Nightguards Alone Don't Solve the Problem


Most people start with a nightguard from their dentist. It protects teeth from damage, which matters. Yet the grinding continues. The tension persists. The pattern remains unchanged.

Some turn to stress management: meditation apps, breathing exercises, therapy. These help many people feel calmer during the day. Yet when sleep comes, the jaw still clenches. The unconscious patterns that drive nighttime grinding operate in different territory than daytime stress reduction reaches.


Single-approach treatments often address one dimension while the cycle continues through the others. The question becomes: what if bruxism stems from multiple sources simultaneously? What if it requires addressing physical structure, nervous system regulation, and emotional patterns together?


Imagine: Waking Up With a Jaw That Feels Like Your Own


Picture waking up without tightness, headaches, or worn-down teeth. When your jaw relaxes, you speak more freely, your shoulders drop, you breathe deeper. Understanding your body as an integrated system opens new possibilities.


The Body-First Approach: Why Structure Comes First


Before addressing emotional components, understand this: your jaw is not separate from your spine.


From a chiropractic perspective, the temporomandibular joint connects intimately to your cervical spine. Neck, shoulder, or upper back misalignment creates compensatory jaw tension. Jaw misalignment cascades down through your spine.


Anyone experiencing bruxism should first consult a highly trained chiropractor, osteopath, or Chinese medicine practitioner to assess whether structural misalignment contributes to grinding patterns.


What to Look For in a Body-Work Practitioner


For bruxism, you want someone who understands the jaw-spine relationship, can assess cranial-sacral alignment, works with fascial tension patterns, and takes a whole-body approach.


If you're in Toronto, we VERY strongly recommend:



If you're in NYC, we also strongly recommend:



The Emotional Dimension: When Your Nervous System Speaks Through Your Jaw


Once physical misalignments are being addressed, we examine emotional patterns. Research confirms strong associations between bruxism and both stress and anxiety. Individuals with certain personality traits related to emotional processing show higher rates of teeth grinding.


Common patterns include:

Unexpressed anger: Grinding mirrors jaw-clenching when we suppress speaking up. Research shows that compulsive, controlling, and aggressive personality traits associate with higher rates of bruxism.

Chronic anxiety: When your nervous system maintains constant alertness, your body never fully relaxes. The jaw stores unprocessed tension.

Perfectionism and control: Many people with bruxism "bite down" on emotions, maintaining tight control. The jaw embodies this pattern.

Lack of stress-processing resources: Without tools to discharge tension, the body compensates through grinding.


Contemporary life deprives us of the motor activity that our ancestors used to release stress. Suppressing emotions and motor activities burdens the body's function, resulting in neuromuscular patterns including bruxism.


(You can learn more about anxiety & stress here.)


The Dual-Pronged Strategy: Why Both Pathways Matter


But don't get me wrong - addressing one avenue does not exclude the other. They work synergistically. When your body achieves structural alignment, your nervous system regulates more easily. When you develop resources for emotional processing, your body holds less tension. Together, they create a foundation for lasting relief.


Here's why we emphasize starting with structural assessment: If we only address emotional patterns while physical misalignments remain, the body can hold the old stress pattern in place, making it difficult to release. In some cases, where people feel little stress or worry and are actually highly resourced emotionally, the work with a chiropractor, rolfer, or Chinese medicine practitioner can clear the misalignment completely, and hypnotherapy becomes unnecessary.


While most people need both dimensions addressed, we like to cover our bases. We don't want you investing time and money in emotional work when the issue is legitimately purely physical.


For our purposes we also don't consider your dentist or GP sufficient for this assessment.


While they serve important roles generally, they typically lack the holistic training and systems-thinking mindset needed for deeper pattern recognition. Most approach the body in an analog, isolated way rather than seeing the interconnected patterns that expert practitioners in holistic fields can identify. The average dentist sees only the teeth and the jaw. The average GP sees only the jaw. A holistic practitioner sees the jaw as an inegrated part of a larger living, dynamic whole, connected by fascial patterns throughout the entire body.


How Hypnotherapy Addresses the Root Causes


Once structural work is underway, hypnotherapy targets unconscious patterns driving the grinding:


Nervous system regulation: Your body learns to shift from hypervigilance to genuine relaxation, especially during sleep transitions.

Emotional processing skills: You build resources to recognize, process, and release stress rather than storing it in your jaw.

Reframing unconscious patterns: Together we identify and update beliefs keeping you "biting down" on life.

Somatic awareness: You develop ability to notice jaw tension building during the day and release it before it becomes chronic.


Research demonstrates hypnotherapy's effectiveness for bruxism. Studies using objective EMG measurements show significant decreases in grinding activity, reduced facial pain, and partners reporting less bruxing noise after hypnotherapy treatment. Long-term follow-up studies document people remaining symptom-free years after treatment.


What Hypnotherapy Can (and Cannot) Do


Setting realistic expectations matters. Here's what hypnotherapy offers and what it cannot replace:


Hypnotherapy can help with:

  • Reducing unconscious jaw tension during sleep

  • Building emotional processing and self-regulation skills

  • Addressing anxiety, perfectionism, and hypervigilance patterns

  • Creating new neural pathways for relaxation and stress discharge

  • Improving sleep quality and ease of falling asleep

Hypnotherapy cannot:

  • Fix structural misalignments (that requires chiropractors, osteopaths, or other body-work specialists)

  • Replace necessary dental interventions for damaged teeth

  • Instantly eliminate deeply ingrained patterns (this unfolds as a process, not a quick fix)


Most people notice meaningful shifts within a few sessions, with ongoing improvements as they practice the tools between sessions.


Hypnotherapy also creates ripple effects: people become more assertive, explore new directions, and report improved wellbeing in areas without these being directly addressed in therapy.


Local Resources and Next Steps in Toronto and NYC


If you're experiencing bruxism:


1. Start with structure: Contact a skilled chiropractor, osteopath, or Chinese medicine practitioner who understands the jaw-spine relationship. Don't know any? Look back up to the beginning of the article for links to really great experts we personally know for help.


2. Address emotional patterns: Once structural work is underway, hypnotherapy with us helps you develop nervous system regulation for lasting change.


3. Take an integrated approach: Work with both practitioners in coordination.


At Toronto Hypnotherapy, we specialize in addressing emotional and nervous system patterns that show up in many ways, including bruxism, and work collaboratively with holistic experts and body-work practitioners all over the world.



Ready to Stop Grinding?


Bruxism can emerge from multiple sources: structural misalignment, nervous system dysregulation, and unprocessed emotional patterns. Addressing it comprehensively, starting with body alignment and also building internal resources and de-stressing, makes lasting relief possible.



You can book a free consultation call here.




References & Citations


Dowd ET. Nocturnal Bruxism and Hypnotherapy: A Case Study. Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2013;61(2):205-218. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23427844/

Clarke JH, Reynolds PJ. Suggestive hypnotherapy for nocturnal bruxism: a pilot study. Am J Clin Hypn. 1991;33(4):248-253. Research summary available at: https://www.wmcarpenter.com/articles/hypnotherapy/bruxism-teeth-grinding

Machado E, Dal-Fabbro C, Cunali PA, Kaizer OB. Is There Association Between Stress and Bruxism? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Front Neurol. 2021;11:590779. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7793806/

Matsubara Y, Komiyama O, Ohi T, et al. Managements of sleep bruxism in adult: A systematic review. J Prosthodont Res. 2022;66(4):535-546. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8958360/

Mezick EJ, Matthews KA, Kamarck T, Strollo PJ, Hall MH. Teeth Grinding: Is Emotional Stability related to Bruxism? Behav Sleep Med. 2010;8(3):156-168. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2934876/

Rodrigues H, Figueiredo R, Melo C, Vieira C, Coelho A, Macedo P. Bruxism. Masticatory implications and anxiety. Acta Med Port. 2006;19(2):83-90. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24294819/

Wieckiewicz M, Paradowska-Stolarz A, Wieckiewicz W. Psychosocial Aspects of Bruxism: The Most Paramount Factor Influencing Teeth Grinding. Biomed Res Int. 2014;2014:469187. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4119714/

LaCrosse MB. Understanding change: five-year follow-up of brief hypnotic treatment of chronic bruxism. Am J Clin Hypn. 1994;36(4):276-281. Research summary available at: https://www.wmcarpenter.com/articles/hypnotherapy/bruxism-teeth-grinding




 
 
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