How Open Mouth Posture Affects the TMJ

Open mouth posture or mouth breathing, has become a much more commonly seen thing in our world today. We live in a very industrialized society where more allergens and toxins are floating around in the air than ever. This is leading to decreased breathability and increased congestion/allergies in many people all over the world. As a result, people are having difficulty with nasal breathing and often feel “stuffed up” which leads to the beginning of the habit of mouth breathing. I will save listing out the detriments our internal body suffers from mouth breathing for another blog post.

But how does keeping your mouth open all the time affect your TMJ (temporomandibular joint)? As we mouth breathe, the tongue lays low in the floor of the mouth and the face begins to reshape and elongate with the jaw slowly retruding back toward our skull. This creates a generally smaller palate over time and teeth get crowded and appear crooked. When the tongue lays low in the mouth, we miss out on a natural form of palate expansion on the roof of the mouth which is necessary to have ample room for our teeth, our tongue, and for breathing.

Meanwhile, the condyle of the temporomandibular joint, where the (joint itself connects to our skull), is going to be shifted back into the socket (from a retruded jaw) handling an abnormal amount of force as well as odd angles and directions of force which compromise the joint mechanics as we utilize our jaw to manage food in our mouth or perform speech. Joints are built to sustain force through normal functional activities. When we perform movements and positions which are not meant for our body, we get breakdown at the joint.

If you are someone experiencing joint pain in your jaw or in the muscles around there are some really simple things you can start doing to reduce that pain without medicine, without injections, and without surgery. Those are:

🌀 Nasal breathing (with mouth closed).
👅 Tongue suctioned to the roof of the mouth (the whole tongue).
🧘🏼 Check in with your posture throughout the day, especially when sitting.

These seem simple, but when NOT addressed, they can promote more joint pain and dysfunction in and around the jaw.

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