Author: Dr. Bryce Hendy, DC, DNCert
It is common thought that jaw tension and dysfunction come from clenching and grinding teeth and stress; while that is true there is another large cause at play for many people – their breathing pattern. The way we breathe affects our posture, neck muscles and even the position of our jaw. If you struggle with chronic jaw discomfort, tension headache, neck pain or temporomandibular joint (TMJ) dysfunction, your breathing habits may be playing a larger role than you realize.
Mouth breathing is one of the breathing habits that can affect our jaw. By switching from the more natural and favorable habit of nasal breathing to mouth breathing, this can cause quite a few changes that can lead to the jaw tension and pain:
- With mouth breathing we have to push our head forward to help open the airway; this causes increased load on the cervical and thoracic joints and the muscles that attach to the jaw, by creating forward head carriage
- By increasing the demand on the jaw muscles this can lead to the jaw popping, clicking or grinding that often accompanies the tension and pain
- Tongue positioning is changed to a more posterior position rather than resting against the roof of our mouth
- This reduces the stability of our jaw and alters the rest position of the jaw
- During mouth breathing our jaw has to stay slightly open which further increases strain on the muscles of the jaw
All these changes are subtle, but as they add up over time with chronic mouth breathing, the end result is jaw tension and dysfunction.
Dysfunctional breathing patterns like shallow breathing and chest breathing, don’t directly affect the jaw, but they do increase strain in the neck, by recruiting our accessory breathing muscles. These are muscles whose main job is not to aid in breathing, unless we are exerting a higher respiratory effort like in exercise. If this recruitment becomes a pattern or habit, this leads to neck tightness and fatigue, which in turn can cause the jaw to compensate for these altered mechanics.
Stress can also be a contributing factor to altered breathing patterns. When we are stressed we will often have elevated shoulders, our breathing becomes shallow and more chest based and we tend to grind our teeth or clench our jaws due to the stress. These again can all add up and have an affect on our jaw and the tension that we feel in the jaw.
Chiropractic care can have a profound effect on jaw pain and tension and help to identify and correct breathing patterns that are possibly contributing. As well as assess and treat the other areas that are correlated with jaw pain and dysfunction.
- Assessment: cervical spine, thoracic spine and rib cage
- Ensure good mobility and no dysfunction
- Assessment: TMJ and surrounding musculature
- Ensure jaw has good mobility and appropriate stability and resting positions
- Assessment: breathing patterns
- Looking to see if someone is a mouth breather and/or chest breather
- Intervention: treat any dysfunction identified during the assessments
- Provide home care recommendations and habit changes to help improve dysfunctional patterns and break habits
- Breath work to help break breathing patterns and return to a more functional breathing pattern that will lend towards less tension and pain in the jaw
- Assist patient with stress management and help find ways to relieve stress to help aid in jaw tension improvement
Breathing is something that a lot of us don’t give much though because it is a subconscious involuntary process that we require to live. That doesn’t mean we can’t improve upon it and along they way take care of some other symptoms that may stem from our breathing patterns.
