If you’ve been dealing with jaw pain or clicking in your jaw, you’ve been diagnosed by someone with Temporal Vendibular Disorder, there’s something really, really important that you need to understand because the issue may not be coming from your jaw. Unfortunately, kind of in the general world out there, we often treat TMD, Temporomandibular Disorders, as if it is a localized problem. But the fact is that your jaw is a hub and I want to share some stuff with you today that you can try that may make an immediate impact on it.
So the very first thing that we’re going to talk about is a little bit of anatomy. The issue that we run into is, like I said, your jaw is not this isolated hinge, it is actually what we refer to as a neural hub because your jaw is innervated by something called the trigeminal nerve. It’s the largest nerve in our skull and it does a lot of different things and it connects to a lot of different places.
And in relationship to your jaw, partly the trigeminal nerve feeds into something in your brainstem called the trigeminal mesencephalic nucleus, which basically says there’s an area that the trigeminal nerve is going to go to and it’s located in my midbrain, the mesencephalon. Now why that’s really important is that area is intertwined with your visual system. And so when some researchers started looking at this, they found some really fascinating things.
These are things that you can actually experience on your own. So what they found was that whenever we do what are called saccadic eye movements. So if I have both my fingers out here, I’m looking at the camera and then I move one finger and I quickly move my eyes toward it.
And then I move my other finger and my eyes move toward it. There is actually reflexive activation of your masseters and your temporalis. These are muscles that help us close our jaw. So again, if you have TMD or you work with people that have jaw issues, you know that very often one side or the other tends to be very tight, often very sore. So you can feel this on your own. Put your fingers on your masseter muscle.
So if you bite down, you will actually feel the muscle popping up under your fingers and just place your fingers there and then just quickly look side to side and you will feel the muscle reflexively contracting. You can do the same thing just above your ears. This is another muscle called the temporalis that you can feel when you bite down.
So there is some reflexive wiring here that is super important. Number one. Number two, they also found that whenever they evaluate people with jaw disorders, if they do something called a pencil pushup, basically where your eyes are doing this motion, this is called convergence.
This is something that we look for all the time in our brain-based approach because poor convergence is often really problematic for people for a whole host of reasons. But here’s what they found in one study. They found that people with TMD, whenever they tested them for this particular eye movement, they found that 75% of them actually also had issues with convergence.
That’s as opposed to about 20% of the healthy population, people without jaw disorders. This actually goes a little bit further. Kids that have jaw deviation when they open their mouth also tend to have problems with convergence.
So we think, again, as we look into this, it’s a bi-directional system where the eyes can impact the jaw and the jaws can impact the eye. Now, before I talk about what to do about it, if you are a doctor, a therapist, a trainer of any kind, maybe you do Pilates or yoga, martial arts, you work with athletes, you’re a personal trainer, I guarantee you that you’re going to work with people with jaw issues because whenever you look into this, the statistics worldwide are that one in two adults actually have some degree of jaw problem. This can be related to headaches and eye pain, neck pain, all kinds of things.
So again, if that is your profession and you’re interested in blending what you’re already good at with kind of applied neuroscience, it’s kind of modern emerging information that we have and how we work with it, you can go to the pinned comment, click the link or email us because we would love to chat with you.
Now, what do we do about this? Well, I’m going to first of all tell you the number one thing you need to do is you need to start paying attention. If you have jaw issues or your clients have jaw issues, tell them for one week, notice when the tension or pain increases.
Very often, remember the statistics, 75% of people with TMD have convergence issues. They will notice, or you will, that after you spend a good deal of time doing up close visual work, your jaw tension will go up. That’s number one.
We need to start to identify, okay, is it using my eyes up here on my phone, on my computer throughout the day? Is that actually inducing more jaw tension? Is that adding to the problem? So that’s number one. It’s just being aware. Number two, then we want to start playing with basic visual exercises.
The easiest exercise to implement is something you can find in tons of my blogs, but it’s called a pencil pushup. So basically I take a pen or pencil with a point. I hold it at arm’s length. I focus on the tip and then I bring it in as close to my nose as I can before the tip splits into two.
Now, in most cases, we need to be able to get this to within about five centimeters of the tip of our nose. A lot of people that you’ll test with TMD, they’ll be somewhere between six and eight centimeters away.
In both instances, what I have people do is I’d have them do five to 10 repetitions of just this very simple in and out motion with the pen, making their eyes converge and diverge. And if you’re, again, a professional, you’re watching to see, is it smooth or is one eye not really cooperating? Maybe one eye is coming in and the other one’s not. If you find that, these are things that need to be addressed.
And if you don’t know how to address them, get in touch with us or check out some of the other blogs. That is going to be one of the most important exercises. Now, the next thing that I do for people with jaw issues, however, is I will then combine this visual movement with jaw movement.
So as the pen is out, I have them push their jaw forward slightly. So they’re jutting their lower jaw forward. And then I actually have them retract the jaw as the pen comes in. So the chin is going out and in. It’s a very, very simple movement, but again, a lot of people with TMD are going to struggle with it, but we first start with the eyes and we’d be combining them.
Now, the other thing, as I mentioned, is you can feel these muscles moving when your eyes go side to side. So another very simple drill that we will ask people to do is we’ll give them a visual target. And then we just have them follow that visual target side to side. But now we’re going to link the eye movement to jaw movement.
So the jaw is going to be going side to side, following the pen because these areas are again, reflexively connected. We want to make sure that we are disentangling any kind of weird tensions that are building up from eye movements in relationship to jaw movements. So spending again, 10 or 12 reps of moving side to side the jaw while the pen is in motion, the eyes are in motion, tends to be a really effective relaxation exercise, as long as we don’t allow people to overdo it. So we’re not taking the pen way out here and we’re not creating a ton of tension with the jaw.
These are very kind of slow, simple, what we call motor control exercises. We’re working on re-coordinating the eyes and the jaw.
So again, if you have been suffering with jaw issues for a long time, you’ve tried splints and braces and you’ve tried massage and dry needling and everything else, and it’s kind of better, but not really to the point that you would hope for it to be. You need to start broadening your thinking. The jaw is a neural hub.
There is anatomy that connects jaw movement to eye movement. So very often you’re going to need to address your eyes in order to make the next step in your recovery. And again, if you are a professional, I guarantee you, you’re working with people with jaw issues.
They may not mention it to you unless you ask them, but when they do, now you have some very, very simple things that you can start to take a look at. So if you are a doctor, a therapist, movement professional of any kind, again, if you’re interested in bridging what you do with modern neuroscience, make sure to click the link and get in touch with us, because we love to share with you what we do.
