Let me break this down the way I wish someone had broken it down for Lena:
Picture one nerve that runs your whole face.
It's called the trigeminal nerve. It runs from your jaw, up your temple, to the back of your head. It is the nerve that fires during a migraine.
And the bottom branch of it runs straight through the muscle you clench.
Your jaw muscles, the masseter and the temporalis, sit right on that nerve branch. Clench them, and you poke the nerve. Neurologists call this trigeminal sensitization.
A clenched jaw can hold enough pressure to keep that nerve lit for hours, and the trigeminal nerve carries more sensory traffic into your brain than almost any other nerve you have. Poke it all day and it does not get to settle.
But YOUR jaw? It's clenching all day, and you don't even feel it.
You answer a hard Slack message? YOU CLENCH. The nerve fires.
You lock into a spreadsheet? YOU CLENCH. Gravity of focus.
You take your Vyvanse and disappear into work? YOU CLENCH HARDER.
It's not only your hormones. It's not only your screens. It's a nerve being poked awake by a jaw nobody ever asked you about.
Here's what the research actually says:
1. Awake jaw clenching irritates the trigeminal nerve.
An irritated trigeminal nerve sits closer to the migraine threshold all day long. It doesn't take much to tip it over the edge into a full attack.
2. Abortives and triptans stop the fire, not the spark.
They shut down the attack after it starts. They do nothing about the clench that keeps relighting it, hour after hour, the next day and the next.
3. A night guard separates the teeth, but never stops the daytime clench.
It protects your enamel from grinding. It is worn at night. The clench that actually pokes the nerve is happening at 1pm at your desk, wide awake, mid-email, and the guard is sitting in a drawer at home. Your dentist did the right thing for your teeth and never said a word about the nerve, because that was never his job.