Relieve Jaw Pain for Better Sleep
Is Jaw Pain Keeping You Awake?
Here’s How Relieving Jaw Pain Helps You Get Restful Sleep
Are you tired of persistent jaw pain and tension? Do you wish for a simple, natural way to solve the situation? Something that you could easily do to relieve stress and feel more at ease in your body. And obviously — to get better sleep?
This new empowering self-help guide offers 7 step-by-step movement exercises designed to release jaw tension through re-educating the connected nervous system patterns.
How to Use Your Bi-directional Nervous System
Within your nervous system, your jaw muscles play many roles; some are obvious and simple to recognize, like the movements of chewing or the jaw movements that facilitate talking and singing. But at a deeper level, especially through the cranial nerve network, your jaw muscles also interconnect with several core level functions, like the systems that facilitate stress or relaxation responses. In fact, your jaw muscles never act alone. They constantly participate in expressing the state of your wellbeing, reflecting your physical, mental, and emotional health.
But there is even more. Because your nervous system works bi-directionally, you can use jaw movements as a gateway, like a portal, that allows you to intentionally communicate with your nervous system, with the motoric (movement) and the autonomic (emotion) sides of it..
Power of Therapeutic Jaw Movements
At first glance, doing therapeutic jaw movements may seem like nothing special at all—maybe even silly, as during the movement exercises your face may look odd at times. However, at a deeper level, the small, slow, and soft movements evoke powerful neural messages that instantly reach both the somatic and the autonomic nervous systems.
The resulting relaxation response soon shifts your body-brain systems to facilitating processes that promote a state of calmness.
Some call it a feeling of being grounded, the state of Zen, meditative bliss, or anything in between. From a health perspective, it’s simply a useful phenomenon with potential to promote continuous improvement.
Gradually, when you more regularly do therapeutic, calmness-inducing jaw movements, your somatic and autonomic nervous systems establish new habitual mechanisms that can better deal with stress-inducing events and challenges. This is what we aim to achieve—a more resilient state of wellbeing.
My Story
As a teenager, I frequently experienced jaw discomfort, struggling with pain while eating or brushing my teeth. I would often wake up at night, realizing I had been grinding my teeth. A few years later, back pain also became a constant issue, but at the time, I had no idea that releasing jaw tension could provide relief in my back.
Seeking a solution, I decided to study the Feldenkrais Method, a neuroscience-backed approach to understanding and changing motor behavior. Motor behavior involves how the brain and nervous system organize movement and function. During the three-year professional training, I was amazed to discover how gentle therapeutic movements can help to heal, develop, and optimize the body and its nervous system.
Gradually, my back pain faded, and my jaw discomfort became a thing of the past. What also happened is that I discovered a new way to improve my sleep quality and to fall asleep more smoothly. I then developed the Moving into Sleep Method.
Today, after many years of improving my sleep quality with various sleep-inducing movements I've learned to favor jaw movements as these easily produce a deeply relaxing feeling. This inspired me to develop more jaw movements and to learn about the neurological connections that make therapeutic jaw movements so effective.
I’m really excited with the results, and I truly believe that anyone can get amazing benefits from doing therapeutic movements. First to improve your sleep, but also to experience benefits from improved breathing, more relaxed eyes, improved vocal performance, a naturally beautiful face, and the list goes on.
Into Lesson
Watch and follow this into lesson to learn how to evoke a relaxation response. Simply follow the step-by-step guide and you will experience how somatic movements start evoking calmness — making it easier to fall asleep and get more deep quality rest.
Thanks for reading,
Oliver
As a self-treatment, the Moving into Sleep Method is based on educational neuroscience that explains how subtle movements can calm your nervous system. By doing the movements you can learn to fall asleep like a smooth movement and get quality sleep even when the conditions are challenging, like during traveling, or when your sleep schedule needs a change.
“Better sleep is a gentle movement away”