Anxiety causing severe jaw problems?

[anon23]

Hi there :)

I was wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar to what I am going through as this is starting to make me very anxious.

Because of my anxiety, I have seemed to develop quite a lot of jaw clenching and teeth grinding, especially at night.

For the past 5 days or so, I have noticed that I cannot close my jaw into a comfortable position. Every time I close my mouth normally I can do so comfortably, but now I have noticed that when I close my jaw the middle bottom tooth is pushing against the back of my middle front top tooth. I am now really worried this is permanent and will require something like jaw surgery, I will go to the dentist soon but I am feeling so anxious. I was wondering if anyone has experienced this.

I really appreciate anyone who takes the time to answer :)

[Jem21]

I'm getting exactly the same, I don't know if anxiety is causing it or if it's my actual jaw or a side effect from the meds that isn't going away! It's causing me a lot of anxiety as it's also causing headaches and a lot of pressure in my face. I'm at doctors tomorrow so I'll let you know what he suggests.

[anon23]

I'm getting exactly the same, I don't know if anxiety is causing it or if it's my actual jaw or a side effect from the meds that isn't going away! It's causing me a lot of anxiety as it's also causing headaches and a lot of pressure in my face. I'm at doctors tomorrow so I'll let you know what he suggests.
Thank you for replying! I am sorry to hear you are going through the same thing as I know how uncomfortable it is, I am also having quite a lot of facial pain and pressure at times due to this.

[helenhoo]

Hi, same here if anyone's seen my post(s)! Mines one sided and feels like it needs to click!

[MyNameIsTerry]

Muscular tension is one of the big common symptoms for anxiety disorders.

When I started my current med I had 6 months of Bruxism. I didn't know what it was back then but asked my dentist at a routine check up as I was concerned it was connected to the wisdom tooth they took out. My symptoms were right-sided jaw ache, pain when chewing, headaches, pains up the side of the face, couldn't close my jaw or open it fully as it felt like pressure pushing back (see that in the OP), etc.

He asked about when it was worse, I replied when I wake up and fades through the day a bit. He checked my teeth and found evidence of grinding and felt my jaw muscles and said they were enlarged. Due to it being worse in the morning, and no grinding/clenching I knew of in the day, he said I was doing it in my sleep.

It is a listed side effect of my med, and you will find Bruxism mentioned against others so it might be worth a look on Drugs.com on the Side Effects tab to see if it mentioned.

He gave me an exercise to do before sleep and recommended soft foods for a while. This is the exercise:

1. With mouth closed, touch tongue to roof of mouth.
2. Open mouth wide and hold.
3. Close mouth.
4. Repeat.

This did help. It works the jaw muscle to relax it. It only got it down to a certain level though and in the end a combination of this and taking a couple of paracetamol sorted it out. It wasn't really bad all the way through though 6 months, more the first couple until I started doing this.

You can get mouth guards for day or night but I was put off by the price and how some people had further jaw problems from wearing them. When I talked about this later at the charity walk-in groups one of the coordinators mentioned having the same problem and how he couldn't use the night guard (it affects your breathing habits so that's a problem for some of us anxiety sufferers and/or insomniacs) but he found sleeping with his little finger in that corner of the mouth dealt with his.

Headaches are common too. If you touch your fingers to your temples and then clench your jaw you will feel the muscle bands around the temples move & tense too. This is why you get headaches from this. You might have seen one of the well known pain killers advertised for headaches demonstrating this on their TV ads last year.

If you fancy using some trigger point massage for this, I posted a link to a free online book and you can read most of it. It does have TMJ exercises in there and trigger point massage is easy enough to learn (5 minute job really) in terms of technique and requires no real equipment (tennis wall and a wall for some exercises). Here it is:

http://www.nomorepanic.co.uk/showthread.php?t=169782

Another member on here used that and found it helped so it might be worth a go.

Don't worry, it's not permanent, it's enlarged jaw muscles with the inability to close or open the jaw fully.

A dentist is the best person to talk to. My GP was pretty poor on this and just said 'people with anxiety get these things' and gave no advice :doh: but my dentist was very helpful. If you have a good GP though, they will be worth asking, mine's not great with anxiety, so I wouldn't want to put anyone off. A dentist has the added ability of dealing with TMJ. I came across all this by searching on this forum before I joined and even know people always say it's TMJ issue. My dentist said that's not the case, this can just be clenching/grinding and that doesn't mean it is or will become a TMJ issue.

[anon23]

Thanks everyone!

@MyNameisTerry thank you for the advice as well :)

[nirvanainchains]

I’ve had locked jaw in my left jaw two months ago. After 4 days the pain went away. Mine could be a combination of Anxiety and teeth grinding. My condition is called TMJ(based on Googling)

[Jem21]

Thanks Terry that is really helpful, I thought today that mine could be down to anxiety, I'm very tense at the moment and I've noticed when I relax my jaw that my temples and nose do feel a lot more relaxed. I upped my meds 5 weeks ago so I think this is causing the tense jaw. It's defo worse in the morning and I actually cracked a tooth during my sleep so I think a trip to the dentist is on the cards!