Today, I’d like to explain why sometimes the advice your dentist gives you regarding your teeth grinding may not be helping. This is coming from seeing someone write in a post that their dentist told them to relax. The person thought sleep is all about relaxing, which is true. Sleep is meant to be the time we relax.

However, during sleep, the things we mostly avoid facing come to the surface. These can be your negative beliefs about yourself, your unprocessed anger, your fears, and especially the fears we bottle up inside or numb out.

We numb these fears by overworking during the day or just staying busy. But when you sleep, all those things come to the surface because your mind is still processing.

The emotions are there; that’s why you may have a hard time relaxing without letting go of the things from the past that you are still carrying deep within you — the emotional baggage and the betrayal.

When you don’t let go of those things, you’ll find it really hard to relax because your mind will be operating from beliefs you built up 10 or 20 years ago without really seeing things from the present moment. You’ll be glued to the past, physically here but mentally still in the past, so you’re not really relaxing.

When you are about to sleep, all these things come to the surface. That’s why you may find it hard to sleep, relax, or even listen to your dentist’s advice to “just relax.”

Sleep triggers those things you’ve never processed, and when they come to the surface, your mind will always try to look for temporary relief to distract you from seeing those unpleasant emotions. To the mind, those things seem too painful to process, so it looks for something to distract you. For you, it’s teeth grinding; for others, it might be drinking, daydreaming, toxic relationships, or overeating.

To really get to the state where you can follow your dentist’s advice to relax, you have to be willing to go all the way, deal with, process, and clear those emotions, or face those fears without running away from them.

That’s why you may get frustrated when you’re just told to relax because it’s not about doing something; it’s about allowing yourself to process those emotions.