Novelist and nightguard-wearer Ed Park’s experience wasn’t quite that drastic, but still, he once broke part of his tooth off on a cookie after years of grinding had weakened them. “It was the most shocking …” said Mr. Park, 37, the other day. “I mean, I’m not that old.”
He grafted his dental trauma onto a character in his new book, Personal Days (Random House), a fictionalized account of his time as an editor at The Village Voice. At an office party, the teeth-grinding character “meets an old coworker who shows up at the party and kind of swings his arms to embrace him and knocks one of the teeth out which has been weakened by bruxism. So the guy’s kind of spouting blood,” Mr. Park said. “I wanted to literalize the anxiety and pressure that these characters were undergoing at an office where things are happening, people are getting fired, there’s a lot of mystery and stress involved.”
Most grinders who catch the problem early and wear a nightguard will never experience the horror of losing a tooth in polite company, but they do still see themselves as part of a unique group, which, for better or worse, signifies the times.
“The nightguard is just the new eyeglasses,” said Ms. Smallwood, back at 71 Irving. “When I think about it that way, I don’t mind wearing it so much. … I don’t see a therapist, and I don’t believe in pharmaceuticals as a way one should live life,” she continued, “but I wonder if the nightguard is just another symptom of a sort of overmedicated, overanalyzed moment.”
Dr. Vasiliki Karlis, associate professor of oral & maxillofacial surgery and director of the residency program at N.Y.U.’s College of Dentistry, offered hope beyond the hated mouthpiece: Apparently Botox, or botulinum toxin, has for several years been used by “a small community” of dentists and oral surgeons to relax the muscles surrounding the temporomandibular joints. “You don’t inject enough so that you paralyze the muscle, so you can’t chew or function or speak, but you inject a tiny amount so that you weaken the muscle,” she explained. Which makes the patient “less likely to grind, clench, bite down hard.” Dr. Karlis said her office has treated four or five patients in this way and that “it’s worked well.” (In the future, perhaps, medispas will treat all the aesthetic symptoms of stress—teeth grinding, wrinkles, acne—in one fell swoop!).
Valium, Klonopin and Ambien can also be helpful (not that most dentists will cop to prescribing pharmaceutical remedies).
But like nail biting and never learning to drive, teeth grinding may be something that New Yorkers just see as part of their collective identity.
“There’s a scene in Margot at the Wedding where Nicole Kidman is going to bed, and she’s this really clenched-up sort of manipulative person,” Mr. Terzian said. “Right before it cuts to the next scene she just sort of flips the mouth guard in. And everyone in the audience just laughed, and I thought to myself, ‘She put that in like a real professional mouth guard wearer.’”
“This is not how I like to think of myself as using the nightguard, but in New York there’s this stress contest—who’s busier, who has the most work, who’s harder to make plans with, who’s the most burdened,” Ms. Smallwood said. “Having the nightguard just rachets you up into a new category. Like, you have it bad.”
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