My wife asked her dentist the other day about the biggest change he has seen in his profession in the last couple of years and his answer almost made her spit out a filling: More and more of us are getting diagnosed with stress-related teeth grinding and wear and tear.
Apparently two years of COVID-19 anxiety has made our teeth more susceptible to bruxism, a.k.a. teeth grinding. This news surprised me, but for a year it has been common knowledge to dentists, according to the American Dental Association.
The Association’s website posted a March 2021 Health Policy Institute poll that provided a list of toothy trends for dentists and the masticating public to chew on.
More than 70 percent of dentists surveyed saw an increase in patients experiencing teeth grinding and clenching, according to the poll, compared to just under 60 percent reporting an increase six months earlier.
Apparently, when we weren’t eating to assuage our COVID anxiety or singing “Happy Birthday” twice in order to wash our hands for the recommended amount of time, we were grinding and gnashing.
Dentists surveyed also said they saw more people with chipped and cracked teeth and something scary-sounding called temporomandibular joint disorder, which includes headaches and jaw pain.
Stress and anxiety, according to the survey, are the culprits behind all this gnashing and grinding.
Part of me is happy to learn that pandemic-induced bruxism is giving dentists a business bump. They shut down completely in March 2020, shuttering their offices except for dental emergencies.
When they reopened for patients in 2021, dental office COVID protocols were every bit as strict as doctor’s offices — maybe even stricter. Hygienists, who in my opinion have one of the toughest jobs, donned face shields and hoped the person opening their mouth two feet away from their face truthfully completed the COVID protocol form.
We can add jaw pain and teeth grinding to a list of pandemic bequeathments that include pandemic puppies that need walking, feeding and love; sweatpants that are reluctantly disappearing from wardrobes as people return to offices; a spike in driving too fast; and COVID pounds put on during the months when people walked less during the work day and snacked more.
Add war in Europe to pandemic worries and we have another affliction: doom scrolling. A column by writer Tyler Cowen published in this newspaper on Thursday loosely defined doom scrolling as a sort of social-media version of the urge that comes over us when we drive by a car accident.
We can’t look away from the sudden, life-altering misfortune of someone who could have just as easily been us. Social media magnifies this urge 100 times by compelling us to continuously view the online litany of ruin, carnage and human misery exploding in Ukraine.
In Cowen’s view, our ability to view the news in real time or almost-real time robs us of a wider perspective on events and the directions they are heading in. I disagree. If I can’t take an active role in working to end the misery in Europe, then I at least have an obligation to bear witness to the war and get as much information on it as I can from different sources.
Of course, the antidote to doom scrolling and bruxism is to embrace positive ways to help people affected by the pandemic and devastated by the Russian slaughter.
If I help someone, if I donate to a reliable charity, then maybe I’ll supplant teeth gnashing with a smile and spend more time writing checks to legitimate Ukraine help organizations or stuffing boxes with donatable clothing and less time doom scrolling.
