Night guards are very effective appliances when it comes to a wide range of dental conditions. They can help protect your teeth, provide relief from pain in numerous areas of your head and jaw, plus they can keep you breathing more effectively. Many dentists use night guards to help their patients live a better quality of life. If your dentist has recently talked to you about the benefits of night guards, it may be time to learn a little more about them.

How Night Guards Can Help to Protect Your Teeth

Your teeth are alive, which comes as a surprise to many people. Instead of depending on them to take care of themselves, you have to do what you can to take care of them. When you grind your teeth, or even clench your teeth when you are trying to focus, this can cause a lot of damage. This is when night guards can go a long way towards helping. Pushing down on your teeth wears them down, and can even crack them. If you do this long enough, you can wear your teeth flat, leaving them in constant pain. Most people grind their teeth in their sleep, when they aren’t awake to prevent it. By wearing night guards while you sleep, you can stop grinding your teeth during the night. This can prevent further damage, and give your teeth a rest.

When you have crowns, large fillings, or even a bridge, if you push down on your teeth without even realizing it, you can crack these pieces. This can cause you to need to replace them at best, or it can break nearby teeth or cause you to choke on the pieces at worst. The best way to avoid this is by wearing night guards. They can keep your teeth separate, and prevent excessive damage from occurring. This keeps your dental work safe, along with the rest of your teeth.

When Night Guards Can Protect You From Excessive Pain

Pain is common when people grind or clench their teeth. This can be pain in the teeth, the jaw, back in the hinge of your upper and lower jaw called your TMJ, or even come out as headaches. By putting night guards in at night, you can prevent or alleviate much of this pain. Your dentist will fit you for your night guards, and have you come in every year or so to check their fit. If they need to be updated, a new set can be made. Pain that stems from inside your mouth can be difficult to treat. By using these guards, you can keep your teeth further apart, allowing your head to rest more naturally while you sleep.

How Night Guards Can Improve Your Ability to Breathe At Night

At night, many people struggle with breathing properly. Most of the time, this can be attributed to sleep apnea. This is a condition where you stop breathing during the night while you sleep. This can happen only a handful of times per night, or dozens of times per hour each night. Wearing night guards gives you relief from this struggle in many cases. A guard can hold your jaw in a different position that is more forward than what you normally sleep at. By jutting your bottom jaw forward, it often opens up your airway, and makes breathing easier.

Your doctor or your dentist may want to use night guards in combination with other treatments to help you breathe a bit easier. You can use a guard while also working on losing weight, if that is contributing to your inability to sleep well at night. Plus, there are also machines that can be used to help keep your airway opened up. Some of the mouthpieces for those machines can be combined with your guard to help hold your airway open. This also keeps your bottom jaw from sliding back. The more you can keep your jaw forward, the less likely your tongue or other tissues are to fall back and impede how you breathe.

Finding Out Which Night Guards Are Best for You Means Talking to the Right People

Night guards offer many benefits. Instead of living with pain or discomfort, you may have extra options you didn’t even know about. Contact the professionals at the office of Mark Levy, DDS. Tell them that you would like to get more information about night guards. They can schedule a consultation for you to see Dr. Levy. Then, after an exam and a discussion, you two can decide what the best form of treatment for your specific ailments.

For any other questions you may have, contact Mark Levy, DDS, today, by calling (614)777-7350. He can help you figure out if you could benefit from getting a set of night guards for yourself.