Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
close window
Housecall Archives
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
close window
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Lifestyle and home remedies
By Mayo Clinic staffBecoming more aware of tension-related habits — clenching your jaw, grinding your teeth or chewing pencils — will help you reduce their frequency. The following tips may help you reduce your TMJ symptoms.
- Maintain good jaw 'posture.' This involves keeping the jaw muscles relaxed with the teeth slightly apart and the tongue lightly touching the roof of your mouth and resting directly behind your upper teeth.
- Avoid overuse of jaw muscles. Eating soft foods, cutting food into small pieces, avoiding sticky or chewy food, and avoiding gum will minimize muscle use and may help alleviate pain. When yawning, try not to open your mouth too wide.
- Stretching and massage. Your doctor or dentist may show you how to do exercises that stretch your jaw muscles and how to massage the muscles yourself. He or she may also show you exercises to improve your head, neck and shoulder posture.
- Heat or cold. Applying warm, moist heat or ice to the side of your face may help you relax your muscles or alleviate pain.
