Hey guys, today I’d like to answer a question someone asked: “I realized that when I stopped smoking, I started grinding my teeth more and more. What’s the connection there?”

Actually, we need to realize something. Most of our habits or pleasurable aspects in life, like smoking, are mostly used as a way to cope with stress and anxiety.

When you’ve been doing it for a long time to the point where it becomes addictive, your mind has stored a lot of unprocessed emotions, and this habit is helping you or giving you temporary relief from those unprocessed emotions.

The mind doesn’t want to show you the emotions you’ve neglected for a long time. Of course, you neglected these emotions unconsciously because you didn’t really know what was happening. Let’s say you got stressed, you took that cigarette, and then you felt better. Instead of letting it go, you ended up bottling them inside your subconscious mind.

So what happens is you may end up stopping the habit but not what was fueling this habit. You may stop the addictive behavior, whether it be smoking or drinking, but without dealing with what was really leading to it, your mind will seek another coping mechanism just to keep you safe because your mind still hasn’t gotten used to you coping with these emotions in a healthy way.

That’s why, for this person, when they managed to stop smoking and then started grinding their teeth, it means that the mind picked another coping mechanism to provide temporary relief from overwhelming underlying emotions.

This is why sometimes you hear about cross-addiction, where you might be addicted to alcohol and then, when you stop, you become addicted to something else. Simply because there’s something fueling these addictions, like having an addictive kind of identity.

Unless that addictive identity is dissolved, it will always pick something else. So now you stopped smoking, but you jumped into chronic teeth grinding. You haven’t really changed as a person on a deeper level when you just stop the habit; you just pick something else to replace it.

Always strive to understand what really causes or fuels your compulsive behavior so that you may not end up picking more compulsive habits under the guise of having overcome a habit. Hope that makes sense, guys. Until next time, have a nice day.