Unhealthy Habits That Damage Your Teeth

When it comes to maintaining your oral health, the most commonly offered advice includes brushing and flossing daily and visiting your downtown Boise dentist regularly. While these habits work to protect the health and integrity of your teeth and gums, there are, however, common daily habits that risk damage to your teeth. Below are some unhealthy habits to be aware of to prevent damage and injury that may harm your teeth resulting in costly repairs.

Using Your Teeth As Tools

You wouldn’t use a screwdriver to hammer a nail, would you? Of course not! The same rule applies when it comes to opening packages, bottles or performing other tasks with your teeth. Unless your job involves chewing food, you should never use your teeth as tools.

Grinding Your Teeth

Grinding weakens the structure and enamel of your teeth. You could also end up with a chipped tooth or joint pain in your jaw from overly-stressed facial muscles. Stress is often the main culprit for teeth grinding. That’s why it’s important to practice relaxation techniques and to talk with your downtown Boise dentist about getting a mouth guard.

Brushing Too Hard

Many people think that in order to clean their teeth properly they need to brush aggressively. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Brushing too hard puts essential tooth enamel that you can’t get back at risk. To prevent this from happening, make sure to brush your teeth with a soft toothbrush using gentle pressure.

Biting Your Nails

Biting your nails not only puts you at risk of ingesting harmful bacteria and viruses, it can also chip your teeth and distort your jaw placement. While it’s a hard habit to break, doing so will provide you with healthy nails, while keeping you and your teeth healthy.

Smoking

Smoking is a dangerous habit that poses serious risks to your Boise dental and overall health. Nicotine can not only hurt the enamel of your teeth, but the smoke from cigarettes contains thousands of chemicals that can destroy healthy cells and cause cancer. For your health and the health of those around you, smoking is an important habit to break.

Summit Dental Group

At Summit Dental Group, our Boise dentists understand we all have bad dental habits. After all, bad habits are easy to form. The good news is that we can break bad Boise dental habits once we learn to recognize them and how they are affecting us. This, in turn, helps us to commit to changing our behaviors.

To find out more about habits that may be hurting your Boise dental health call us at (208) 314-2275. Our dedicated team of dental professionals would be more than happy to set up an appointment and answer any questions you may have.