I grind my teeth. Can hypnotherapy save me?

Hippos have the most powerful bite force of any land mammal. Photo / Greg Bowker

A lifelong teeth grinder, Joanna Wane turns to hypnotherapy for help.

Of all land mammals, the humble hippopotamus has the most powerful bite, capable of bisecting a human with one chomp. I probably come a close second.

A teeth grinder from childhood, I’ve developed such strong jaw muscles from punishing nocturnal workouts that I’ve smashed through numerous fillings, worn down my teeth and disintegrated an “unbreakable” crown in a matter of weeks. If I’d been Charlie, the baby who went viral for biting his brother’s finger, there’d have been a lot more blood in that video.

I first came across the word “bruxing” (the official term for teeth grinding) when our daughter had pet rats. Cats purr when they’re happy; rats brux — a soft, repetitive grinding of their incisors that’s a much more endearing sound than whatever you’re imagining in your head right now. Last week, I was talking to a “comfort grinder” who bruxes as she’s waking up in the morning and finds the sensation calming.

Kids often go through a teeth-grinding stage before growing out of it. For me, it’s become an ingrained habit. According to the UK’s Bruxism Association, around 70 per cent of sleep bruxism cases are stress-related. Other contributing factors include too much caffeine, the use of recreational drugs, side effects from certain anti-depressants, and what the Mayo Clinic describes as an “aggressive, competitive or hyperactive” personality type.

That doesn’t sound like me, but I do clench my jaw when I’m upset or angry and often have aching jaw muscles because they’ve been at boot camp all night. Still, it turns out I’m not an Olympic-class human hippo after all. My dentist, Chris Leishman at Herne Bay Dental, puts me in only the top 10 to 20 per cent of grinders: “Fortunately you’re not in the top 1 per cent — those are the people who fracture their teeth so badly that I have to extract them.”

Some chronic bruxers have Botox injections to relax the masseter muscles, which are responsible for chewing. That’s expensive and requires follow-up treatments every few months. It also targets the symptoms, not the cause.

This year, a milestone birthday will tumble me into another decade. I’ll be writing more about this for Canvas in the coming weeks, but a few months ago, I took a DNA age test through Auckland-based biotech company SRW and set myself a 12-month challenge to lower my cellular age — as opposed to my chronological age — before being retested In November on my next birthday.

One of the key goals is to do a better job of managing my stress levels, not easy when New Zealand and the rest of the world seem to be teetering on the edge of apocalypse. If hypnotherapy can help people quit smoking, I wondered, could it stop me from grinding my teeth?

Whakatāne-based hypnotherapist Julie Lambert was in the UK working as a life coach when she began looking for ways to help a 19-year-old kick his addiction to cannabis. She’d had a positive experience with hypnotherapy in her 30s to quit a casual smoking habit and later used it to overcome slight stage fright. “In one session, it was fixed,” she says. “I could still feel [the stage fright] was there in the background, but I just wasn’t that bothered about it. So it takes the edge off.”

Her hypnotherapy practice, Falling Upright, often gets referrals from GPs and counsellors, and typically deals with issues such as phobias, weight, smoking and anxiety. Many of the people she’s treated are athletes, including an Olympic swimmer, and she’s currently overseas with her husband, a high-performance coach, as part of the support team for a top Canadian tennis player.

Lambert’s approach is to look into the past for a possible trigger — what she describes as a misplaced “part” that’s got stuck due to trauma or even a shock or surprise in childhood. Trying to use willpower to modify behaviour that’s being controlled by your subconscious is not the right approach, she says. “You don’t want to just talk to the conscious mind because that’s the wrong department. The more relaxed the person is [through hypnotherapy], the more the team at the back will tell me where to look [for the lost part] in the vastness of the engine room of the subconscious.”

For example, one client who’d recently moved into his new house was so bothered by its constant creaking that he was considering putting it back on the market. After talking to Lambert, he realised he associated creaking floorboards with the sound of his violent stepfather coming home drunk from the pub. “We just picked up that little lost part and brought it back into the main team. By reconciling that, there’s been a huge change in just one session.”

In my case, she thinks the clue might lie in the break-up of my parents’ marriage and the sudden departure of my father, without any warning, when I was 10. Perhaps, suggests Lambert, the role I took on of being a “good girl” for my mother — internalising my feelings rather than expressing them — is symbolically tied to what’s become a lifelong habit of carrying tension in my jaw.

She talks me through the hypnosis process and then asks me to lie down on the bed, where I relax so deeply it feels as if the mattress is sinking down through the floor. I’m still completely aware of my surroundings and able to answer the occasional question as she guides me down a virtual hallway and through a green door into the “time travellers room”, where a golden thread connects me to the past and to the future.

Over the next 20 minutes, we revisit a particular scene with me as a 10-year-old, drop by my body’s “control room” to adjust a few dials, and take a tour of my organs to have a sympathetic chat with my jaw. Finally, I imagine my future self going through the day, giving permission for my “team” to reset back to normal. “They can run themselves,” says Lambert. “You don’t actually need to do anything, just let them get on.”

So, did it actually work? It’s a subtle process, Lambert tells me, but I might feel lighter and less bothered by conflict. One day, I might just know somehow that I don’t need to wear a nightguard to protect my teeth anymore. I do think my jaw muscles have lost some tension — and that sense of deep relaxation was truly wonderful.

“When you relax the body, the conscious mind just floats and lets go,” she says. “Powering down and having time out is far more important than people realise. We love that feeling.”

They say your teeth are a window to your wellbeing, so who knows? Maybe, in a good way, it’s taken years off my life.