Stress often shows up in the face as clenched teeth, a tongue pressed against the palate, a furrowed brow and shorter breathing. Clenching your teeth during the day is a pattern your nervous system learned to get through stress and effort more easily, so a decision alone is not enough to change it: the pattern has to be learned anew. The solution lies in neuroplasticity, the nervous system’s ability to keep learning, so that the body can organize itself in a different and more efficient way. This article is about exactly that.
Before you read on, notice your mouth. Are your teeth touching? Where is your tongue? You may find that your teeth are together even though you are not doing anything in particular. You are just reading.
The jaw does not tighten only in difficult moments. It often happens in completely ordinary situations: while you cook, drive, listen to someone, look at your phone or try to fall asleep. For some people work sets it off, for others relationships, and for others their own thoughts. The triggers differ, but the pattern is the same: the teeth come together, the tongue presses against the palate, and the breath gets shorter.
Most advice about a tight jaw comes down to one thing: relax it. That relaxation rarely lasts longer than a few seconds. As soon as your attention moves to something else, the teeth clench again.
In this article I want to show you why this happens and what helps instead. I start from one idea: clenching your teeth is an old, well-learned strategy of your nervous system. Instead of trying to shut it down by force, we can get curious about how exactly we clench, and give the nervous system a chance to find a better strategy.
What is the purpose of clenching your teeth?
When you lift something heavy, your teeth naturally clench. The body is looking for stability: the jaw, neck and trunk lock so that the force has something to push from. That is a good solution.
What happens later is interesting. The same pattern starts to switch on even when there is nothing heavy to lift. When you concentrate on a difficult text. When you wait for your turn to reply. When you swallow a sentence you don’t want to say. In each of these situations the tight jaw carries the same message: be ready, pull yourself together, hold on.
The whole face takes part. The brows draw together, the gaze narrows, the lips press, the tongue pushes against the palate. The jaw is not an isolated muscle. When you open and close your mouth, your head and neck move with it. A tight jaw rarely comes alone: the whole face often tenses with it, the neck stiffens and the breath gets shorter.
Moshe Feldenkrais opened his book Awareness Through Movement with the idea that we move, feel, think and act in accordance with the image we have of ourselves. By self-image he meant the inner sense of your own body: where your shoulders are, how you stand, how wide your jaw is, how much strength you need to do something. Most of this image forms without our knowing, through the movements, positions and reactions we repeat day after day.
The same is true of clenching. When difficult moments end with clenched teeth hundreds of times, the nervous system writes this into your self-image as the normal way to make an effort. After a while you no longer feel the clenching as tension. You feel it as part of yourself.
What the research says
Researchers call jaw clenching during the day awake bruxism: the chewing muscles are active while we are awake, the teeth touch or clench, or the lower jaw is held tense and “braced”, even when the teeth are not touching (Lobbezoo et al., 2018).
- A 2024 meta-analysis estimates that about 23% of adults have awake bruxism (Zieliński et al., 2024).
- In studies where people recorded on their phones several times a day what their jaw was doing, clenching or tooth contact was recorded in roughly a third of the checks. Most often it was simple tooth contact (Colonna et al., 2023).
- Stress is one of the factors most often associated with teeth clenching.
In otherwise healthy people, experts describe awake bruxism as a behavior. Behaviors are learned, which means they can also be learned differently.
Why “just relax” doesn’t work
There is a paradox here that psychotherapists and movement teachers know well. The Gestalt psychiatrist Arnold Beisser described it in 1970 as the paradoxical theory of change: change happens when we fully accept what we are, while trying to force ourselves to become something else usually creates resistance (Beisser, 1970).
When you order your jaw to relax, two intentions collide inside you. One wants calm. The other, the one that clenches the teeth, wants readiness, composure and protection. You can imagine them as two parts of you: two inner strategies that are both trying to help you, just in different ways. This way of seeing comes from parts work, an approach in which each such strategy is seen as a part of you with its own good intention.
When you try to shut down the part that clenches your teeth by force, it does not disappear. It holds on even tighter, or quietly comes back as soon as your attention shifts. A simple principle applies here: when that part of you feels seen, understood and accepted, it stops fighting. Only then can it change. IFS (Internal Family Systems), the method developed by psychotherapist Richard Schwartz, rests on the same principle: parts of the personality are approached with curiosity and compassion, and then they often soften on their own.
The body works in a similar way, and this is where it becomes interesting. Tension we fight tends to hold on even harder, while tension we get to know with curiosity often begins to change by itself. A more useful question, then, is how to show your nervous system that there is an easier way to prepare for effort.
The principle of less effort: why “very slowly” is the solution
Feldenkrais explained this with a simple image. If you are holding an iron bar, you will not feel a fly land on it. If you are holding a feather, you will feel it clearly (as described in Doidge, 2015). The image is broadly consistent with a principle from psychophysics, the Weber-Fechner law: our ability to perceive a difference depends on how strong the baseline stimulus is. The greater the effort, the bigger the change has to be before we notice it at all.
Apply this to the jaw. If your jaw is strongly clenched, the difference between strong and slightly weaker clenching is almost invisible to your nervous system. The difference is too small to become clearly perceptible, so the jaw quickly returns to the old way. But if you bring your teeth together very gently and then slowly release, the difference becomes clear, and your nervous system can work with it. When it clearly senses that the same movement can be done with less effort, it gets evidence that an easier way exists. When this experience is repeated a few times, the nervous system starts choosing the easier way by itself, without your constant control. This is exactly how a new habit forms, and neuroplasticity is the name for this ability of the nervous system to learn from experience.
That is why in Feldenkrais lessons we use small, slow movements with many variations. Small, slow movements make it easier to sense what you are doing, and once you sense it, you have a choice. Variations, for example when the eyes move with the jaw and then in the opposite direction, give the body more options than it had before the lesson. When the body has more options, clenching stops being the only thing it knows.
There is also evidence that simple self-monitoring can influence awake bruxism. In one small study, young adults tracked their jaw through an app for a month. The share of moments with relaxed jaw muscles rose from 62% to 74%, and tooth contact fell from 20% to 11%. The authors believe part of the change came from increased awareness alone (Zani et al., 2019).
How to bring the new way into everyday life
Here are four moves for everyday life. Below them is a short exercise that prepares you for them.
- Reduce instead of removing. When you catch yourself clenching, don’t try to relax your teeth completely right away. Clench just a tiny bit more, then release half of it, very slowly. This way your nervous system gets a clear difference, and a clear difference is something it can remember.
- Return to the resting position. Lips closed and soft, teeth slightly apart, tongue resting freely in the mouth. This is a place you can always come back to, without needing to hold it there by willpower.
- Link the check to everyday triggers. A red traffic light, opening your email, reading a message, or a few reminders on your phone, as in the studies I mentioned. In that moment, just notice whether your teeth are touching, where your tongue is and what your breath is like. The habit switches on in the same situations every time, so those are exactly the situations where it is easiest to change.
- Include the rest of your body. When you notice in one of those situations that you are clenching your teeth, you don’t have to work with the jaw alone. Widen your gaze so you also see what is to the sides, feel how your feet rest on the floor and let out one slightly longer exhale. The jaw, eyes, neck and breath work together, so when any one of them softens, it is easier for the jaw to soften too.
Exercise: jaw, eyes and head (3 minutes)
Do it sitting, with very small and slow movements, always within a range that feels clearly comfortable, and if a movement causes pain, stop the exercise.
- Support. Sit toward the front half of a chair with your feet on the floor. Feel the contact of your pelvis with the chair and your feet with the floor.
- Get to know the joint. Very gently bring your fingers to the jaw joint, just in front of your ears and slightly lower. Slowly open your jaw, just a little, and close it. Does the movement appear first on the left side or the right? Or is it perhaps symmetrical?
- Less effort. Lower your hands. Bring your teeth together very gently, with much less strength than usual, then release very slowly. Repeat three times, each time with even less strength and an even slower release. This is the feather principle from the previous section: you are looking for the smallest effort in which you still clearly feel the difference.
- Jaw left and right. Open your jaw slightly and move your lower jaw a little to the left, back to the center, then a little to the right. A very small movement. Then let your head follow the jaw, and then try moving your head in the opposite direction from the jaw. If this is difficult, slow down even more.
- Eyes. Move your jaw left and right together with your eyes, along the line of the horizon. Then let the eyes move in the opposite direction from the jaw. Notice whether at any moment you hold your breath or tighten muscles that aren’t needed for this.
- Pause. Bring your jaw, head and eyes back to the center. Feel your breath, your face, your tongue, the length of your spine. What is different in your experience now?
Keep the movements small and pleasant, without forcing. There is no need to complete all the repetitions.
Frequently asked questions
Is clenching your teeth during the day the same as grinding them in your sleep?
No. Researchers look at them separately. This article is about clenching and a tense jaw while awake, because that is where attention and learning have the most room.
Why do I clench my jaw when I concentrate?
Concentration is a form of effort, and the whole body prepares for effort: the gaze narrows, the breath gets shorter, the teeth come together. When you notice this, you can check whether this task really needs that much effort in your face.
Can the Feldenkrais Method help with a tight jaw?
Yes. The Feldenkrais Method is a way of learning, and it works precisely with the habits we don’t notice. Through the lessons you learn to sense how the jaw, tongue, eyes and neck work together, and you discover easier ways. Because the nervous system changes through experience, the new way can become a new habit, and the old tension then usually eases because it is no longer needed.
How quickly can I expect a change?
You may notice that your face feels softer after the very first exercise. A habit that has lasted for years usually takes more repetition and patience. Every time you notice clenched teeth, that is already part of the learning.
What next?
In Feldenkrais lessons we explore how the jaw, tongue, eyes, head, neck and pelvis work together, through movements similar to those in the exercise, only longer and with more variations. In individual sessions I adapt the work completely to you: we choose movements based on how your jaw, neck and breath organize themselves, we go at a pace that feels good to you, and together we observe what changes, without hurry and without needing to “fix” anything. Gradually you begin to recognize the old pattern as soon as it appears, before the tension builds up, and you gain more choice, ease and freedom in everyday situations.
If you’d like to explore your pattern of effort together, we can work one to one, online. It starts with a free 20-minute call, where you can ask questions and see whether this way of working suits you. Book a free call or read more about 1:1 somatic sessions.
Sources
- Beisser A. (1970). The Paradoxical Theory of Change. In: Fagan J., Shepherd I. L. (eds.), Gestalt Therapy Now. Science and Behavior Books.
- Colonna A. et al. (2023). Ecological Momentary Assessment of Awake Bruxism Behaviors: A Scoping Review of Findings from Smartphone-Based Studies in Healthy Young Adults. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 12(5), 1904.
- Doidge N. (2015). The Brain’s Way of Healing. Viking.
- Feldenkrais M. (1972). Awareness Through Movement. Harper & Row.
- Lobbezoo F. et al. (2018). International consensus on the assessment of bruxism: Report of a work in progress. Journal of Oral Rehabilitation, 45(11), 837 to 844.
- Schwartz R. C., Sweezy M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Zani A. et al. (2019). Ecological Momentary Assessment and Intervention Principles for the Study of Awake Bruxism Behaviors, Part 1. Frontiers in Neurology, 10, 169.
- Zieliński G., Pająk A., Wójcicki M. (2024). Global Prevalence of Sleep Bruxism and Awake Bruxism in Pediatric and Adult Populations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 13(14), 4259.
I am Nikola, a certified Feldenkrais practitioner and somatic coach, with about nine years of somatic work. Here I write about different approaches to the body: how to understand it better, how to learn new ways of using it, and how to build a more holistic relationship with your body and with life.
Ways to work with me
- 1:1 somatic sessions onlineindividual work, online
- Online Feldenkrais sessionshands on guidance through movement
- Workshops and retreatsin person, in a group
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