So if our patient has pain in the face, ear, or jaw that is coming from muscles, we don't want to jump in with our joint treatments like maximal stretching or joint mobilizations because that will actually exacerbate their muscle pain and it will send their progress the opposite direction. I always encourage patients to use 10 to 15 minutes of moist heat or even a heating pad is fine, along with self-massage in order to help relax their muscles. It's also important for us to educate them about the habits that we all do with our jaw. So during my interview, I will introduce this concept. Do you ever happen to catch yourself touching or clenching your teeth together during the day? Yes. Yes. And honestly, most of us do. Even just barely touching our teeth together is more tension than we want in our jaw. In order to help train this, any time you catch yourself touching your teeth together during the day, I want you to think about letting your tongue rest up toward the roof of the mouth. We call this tongue up, teeth apart. When our facial muscles relax, they get nice and soft and our tongue, like a hammock, just floats up toward the roof of the mouth. So if you catch your tongue down or pressing against your teeth or if you catch yourself clenching, we can use that tongue position as a way to trigger ourselves to relax. We have some additional exercises we can use in order to help break that cycle and decrease your muscle tension. So for these exercises, I'm first going to have you feel your muscles to get a sense of what a tight muscle actually feels like. So go ahead and put your fingertips, I'll show you, right here in your face. Good. As you kind of feel around a little bit, how does it feel? Is it hard? Is it soft? Is it squishy? It's a little hard. A little bit hard, yeah. Move back a little bit closer to your ear, too, so you kind of feel the whole muscle. So a muscle is basically a piece of meat and when it's tight, it feels like frozen meat. When it's relaxed, it feels nice and squishy. On your hand, feel that fleshy, squishy part of your hand. Can you tell that that's kind of soft and squishy? Now press your thumb and your pinky together and feel that same spot. Can you feel how hard it is? Now feel back up by your face. And can you tell that that feels kind of like that tight spot? Right. So you can use your hand as a cue to show yourself how you want it to feel. As an exercise, we're going to combine that tongue up position. Another little trick is if you say the letter N, that kind of floats your tongue up in the right position. And then you also want to imagine that you have soft, doughy, marshmallow-y muscles in your face. So go ahead, say N, then take in a breath, nice big exhale, feel your muscles, let your jaw hang, let your lips go, let your teeth go, good. And you can do this self-massage on your own throughout the day and imagine that you're kneading bread dough. So you can kind of squish around, yeah, those already feel softer compared to before. I can tell that they're looser. You can do the same thing up in your temples. Go ahead and feel your temples. These aren't quite as squishy, but you can feel where they're tight and sometimes where they're painful. So a nice stretch, because I don't want to crank you open if your jaw is clicking or moving to the side. If you take your hands and lightly pull them down the sides of your face, yep, good. You don't want to pretend like your jaw is melting, your jaw might fall open a little bit when you do it. That feels like a little bit of a stretch in these muscles, but it's not going to flare you up. The other thing that we can do is massage on the inside and the outside at the same time. So for this, with clean hands, go ahead and open your jaw. You have that thumb on the inside and then you'll gently knead that muscle between your thumb and your index finger like you're kneading bread dough. Okay, good. And that's usually easiest in the shower or when your hands are clean.

pain relief techniques

face pain

ear pain

jaw pain

muscle relaxation