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Could Joe Tension be quietly feuding your margarines?
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Welcome to Margarine Heroes, a podcast for anyone living with margarine and wondering why nothing
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has fully worked yet. I'm Diane Ducarme. Over the past 7 years, I've helped hundreds of people
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living with margarine. What I've learned? No two margarine stories are exactly the same,
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and none of them are simple. That is why, in this podcast, we explore margarine from many
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different angles. Food, hormones, stress, sleep, the nervous system, emotions, and much more,
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through the lens of both modern science and traditional Chinese medicine. A quick note
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before we start. What we talk about here is educational. For anything related to diagnosis
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or medication, please keep working with your doctor. Now take a deep breath and let's dive in.
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In this episode, you will learn how to recognize the clues that your jaw muscles,
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teeth clenching, or temporomandibular system, TMJ, may be adding fuel to your margarine attacks,
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especially if you wake with headaches or feel pain around your temples.
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Understand why something as simple as keeping your teeth slightly apart at rest may matter,
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why tongue position is interesting, and why a mouth guard does not necessarily mean you have
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solved the clenching itself. And a simple jaw reset routine you can try today at home,
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without expensive equipment, aggressive massage, or complicated exercises. Stay with me till the
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end, because at the end of this episode, you will have a simple way to test whether your jaw
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may be one piece of your personal margarine puzzle, and what you can safely do about it.
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Now I actually got the inspiration for this episode from Reddit. I came across the story
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from someone who had been struggling with headaches and jaw clenching for a long time,
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and after a lot of trial and error, they discovered a few surprisingly simple things
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that made a big difference for them. And then I found another interesting one,
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slightly different, and I thought the experience was fascinating and worth sharing,
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not because what worked for one person will necessarily work for everyone,
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but because it gives us some really interesting clues, clues to explore.
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So in this episode, we're going to look at jaw clenching and Bruxism,
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unpack some of the things these people tried, and then look at what science actually says
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about why your jaw might be connected to your headaches or margarines.
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And I also want to add another layer here. So science is always evolving,
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and not everything has been fully explained yet, and sometimes a lived experience helps us
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notice patterns much before research has completely connected the dots.
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So stay curious, pay attention to what your own body is telling you,
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and use that intuition alongside good medical guidance,
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because sometimes what works for you just does.
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So if you've spent months or years waking up with headaches,
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rubbing your temple like you feel pressure in your face,
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and you wonder why your neck is permanently tense,
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and being told that your scans are normal or that you're simply stressed,
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it's just infuriating and so frustrating, and it just takes the life out of you.
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And sometimes the missing clue is hiding in something so ordinary
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that nobody thinks to ask about it.
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What is your jaw doing all day?
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And perhaps even more importantly, what is your jaw doing all night?
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One listener may say, oof, I grind my teeth.
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Another may say, I do not grind, I just clench.
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Another wakes with sore teeth.
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Another notices deep aching beneath the cheekbones.
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And another person may feel absolutely nothing in the jaw,
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but frequently wakes with a headache around the temples.
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So I want to unpack what might actually be happening.
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So what do we mean by jaw clenching?
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So scientists generally use the word bruxism
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to describe repetitive activity of the chewing muscles.
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And so that can include grinding the teeth,
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clenching them, or simply bracing the lower jaw.
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And importantly, there are two different phenomena.
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There's awake bruxism, when you clench, brace,
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or when you hold tension while conscious.
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And there's also sleep bruxism, which happens at night during your sleep.
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And an international group of experts explained in the Journal of Oral Rehabilitation,
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we don't have that journal very often here in this podcast.
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So this was in 2018, that bruxism should not automatically be considered a disease.
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So in many otherwise healthy people, it is better understood as a behavior
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that may or may not create consequences depending on its intensity,
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frequency, the person's pain system, the dental health, the sleep, and other factors.
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So it's important because I don't want you to hear this episode and immediately think,
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Therefore, clenching causes all of my migraines.
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So this is not what the evidence shows.
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So migraine is considered a neurological disease involving complex changes
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in sensory processing and pain pathways.
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And so jaw clenching can be one additional source of sensory input into that whole system.
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So for some people, that additional input may barely matter.
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And for another person whose nervous system is already highly sensitive,
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it may matter a great deal.
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Now migraine and painful jaw disorders, they really do overlap.
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The association is not imaginary at all.
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There was a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis
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found that adults with migraine had substantially more painful and muscular
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temporomandibular disorders than people without headaches.
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And the association was particularly strong for painful muscles-related jaw disorders.
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And then an even more recent systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of
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Oral Rehabilitation in 2026 looked at the relationship in both directions.
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And people with migraine were considerably more likely to have a
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temporomandibular disorder, so TMJ.
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And people with a temporomandibular disorder were also more likely to have migraine.
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And the author describes the evidence for the association as strong.
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And so that's why in the Migraine Heroes app, we have a number of pain locations,
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many pain locations.
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Actually, people love that interface because they can really picture themselves well.
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And so TMJ, jaw and TMJ, are definitely one of those right and left.
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But here, there's a crucial sentence.
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The association does not tell us which condition caused the other.
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It may not even be a simple cause-and-effect relationship at all.
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Migraine may make the jaw region more sensitive.
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And jaw pain may increase sensory input into an overly sensitive migraine system.
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And then stress, poor sleep or nervous system arousal or neck pain,
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pain may influence both conditions.
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And sometimes several of these factors are happening also simultaneously.
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Now, the trigeminal connection is really important here.
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One reason this relationship makes biological sense is something called the trigeminal system.
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And so the trigeminal nerve is a major sensory nerve surfacing your face, your jaw, your teeth,
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your temples and parts of your head.
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And it also plays a central role in migraine biology.
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So your chewing muscles, particularly the large masseter muscles in your cheek
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and the temporalis muscle running over your temples,
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they send sensory information into pathways that overlap
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with the same broader trigeminal network involved in migraine.
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So imagine you have a nervous system that is already standing near the edge of its tolerance.
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And then light is louder, sound is louder, smells are stronger.
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And then hormonal changes may matter.
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Sleep disruption matters, stress matters.
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And then you add hours of muscle contraction and repetitive sensory input from the jaw.
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And so in some people, that may become one more signal entering an already overloaded system.
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Now, researchers have also found evidence of
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altered pain sensitivity in people with chronic temporal mandibular disorders.
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This is why I prefer to think of the jaw not necessarily as the cause,
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but sometimes as an amplifier.
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And that is a much more useful concept.
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So how do you know whether your jaw is involved?
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There are some clues worth paying attention to.
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Do you wake with pain or pressure around your temples?
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Does your jaw feel tired when you wake up?
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Are your teeth sensitive even though your dentist cannot find decay?
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Do you catch yourself pressing your teeth together while working,
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driving, concentrating, cooking, or scrolling through your phone?
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Does chewing tough food make your headache worse?
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One that is really worth paying attention to.
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Can opening your mouth widely reproduce some of your familiar pain?
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Do the muscles at your temples or along the sides of your cheeks feel unusually tender?
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Does your jaw click with pain or occasionally lock?
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And perhaps a particularly useful clue.
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Does your familiar temporal headache change when you chew,
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clench, move your jaw, or press on the chewing muscles?
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So research found that headaches attributed to temporal mandibular problems
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often have exactly this characteristic.
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Temporal headache changes with jaw function or jaw behaviors
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and can sometimes be reproduced during examination of the temporalis muscle or jaw movements.
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So that does not mean you should diagnose yourself by poking your temples,
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but it gives you something useful to investigate.
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Now, what about stress?
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This is where people often say, well, obviously I clench because I'm stressed.
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And sometimes, yes.
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But the answer is still incomplete.
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So awake clenching is often influenced by concentration,
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by emotional tension, habits, posture, and psychological stress.
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Sleep Bruxism is different.
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Sleep Bruxism is connected to events occurring within sleep itself,
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so including brief episodes of nervous system activation.
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And research also shows that it can occur alongside other sleep-related conditions.
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Now, a systematic review in the journal Sleep found higher rates of sleep Bruxism
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in several sleep-related disorders, including obstructive sleep apnea,
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although the exact mechanisms are still being investigated.
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So if you grind your teeth at night, snore loudly, or wake gasping,
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or you feel extremely sleepy during the day or have repeatedly unrefreshing sleep,
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do not assume stress explains everything.
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Your sleep itself may deserve attention.
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Now we get to something that appeared in both of the personal stories that inspired this episode.
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A person gets a guard, suddenly has fewer migraines, and thinks,
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that's it, that was it.
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Another person gets a guard and says, I swear I clench even harder with this thing.
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And both experiences can occur.
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One of the primary purposes of a dental appliance is very straightforward.
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It can protect your teeth from damage.
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And that's valuable.
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But protecting the teeth is not the same thing
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as proving that the appliance has stopped sleep Bruxism.
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A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis found that conventional oral appliances did
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not consistently reduce chewing muscle activity or bite forcing in people with sleep Bruxism,
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and the certainty of much of that evidence was low.
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And when researchers specifically examined people who had both headaches
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and temporomandibular disorders, the results remained uncertain.
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There was a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Journal of Oral Rehabilitation
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in 2025, and they found that stabilization appliances and physiotherapy may help some
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patients, but the studies were small and heterogeneous.
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So the certainty around headache improvement remained limited.
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So in other words, a mouth guard can be useful without being a universal migraine treatment.
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So there are also some front tooth appliances designed to change muscle recruitment.
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Some individuals report significant benefits, but these devices should be professionally fitted
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and monitored because anterior appliances can create unwanted changes involving individual
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So please do not hear about a specific appliance online and order something yourself because
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somebody on a forum said it cured their headaches.
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Your jaw deserves individualized care.
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Now, what about the tongue position?
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Is it a useful clue or a miracle cure?
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So let's talk about what I think is the most interesting part of those personal stories,
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the tongue position.
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So the person discovered that instead of allowing their jaw to hang under tension, they felt
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dramatically better when they placed the tongue gently against the roof of the mouth and allowed
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their teeth to separate.
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There's actually a useful principle hidden here.
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At rest, your upper and lower teeth generally should not be pressed together.
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Now, guidance from the National Health Service and from specialists,
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temporomandibular clinics recommends allowing the teeth to remain slightly apart when you're
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University College London hospitals also advise some patients to rest the tongue gently against
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the roof of the mouth while keeping the teeth apart.
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Now, this can act as a simple behavioral cue for jaw relaxation, but we need to separate
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that from a much bigger claim.
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So there's not good evidence that one exact tongue position would stop sleep bruxism or
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So I would not tell you that your tongue must be glued to your palate all day.
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And I certainly would not tell you that an incorrect swallow is secretly causing migraines.
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The useful idea is much more simple.
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Can you find a resting position in which your jaw is not constantly working?
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For many people, it means lips comfortable, tongue resting gently, teeth apart, jaw muscles
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And that simple awareness may be especially useful for awake clenching.
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Now, the second personal story describes regularly massaging the jaw muscles and experiencing
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a dramatic reduction in headache.
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And so could massage help?
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Potentially, yes, in some cases.
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Systematic reviews of manual therapy of temporomandibular disorders suggest that hands-on treatment can
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reduce jaw pain and improve mouth opening in some patients.
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Researchers reported beneficial effects in a 2023 systematic review of randomized trials,
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although outcomes vary between techniques and individuals.
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But again, there is a difference between reducing jaw pain and proving that massage
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prevents migraine.
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The headache-specific research remains much less certain.
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Now, let us shift lenses because Western medicine asks, which nerve, which muscle, which receptor,
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which diagnostic category?
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Traditional medicine often starts somewhere else.
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It asks, where is the body holding?
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What is no longer flowing?
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What has become excessive, constrained, or depleted?
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And they're not equivalent scientific language, but traditional Chinese medicine concepts
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should not be mistaken for modern anatomy.
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But sometimes a different language helps us notice something that our normal language
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has missed or lost.
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And the jaw is fascinating through that lens.
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Because what is clenching?
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It is holding two surfaces pressing towards one another.
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Muscles that are designed to move become fixed.
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A system that should alternate between effort and release becoming stuck in effort.
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And traditional Chinese medicine frequently describes tension associated with emotional
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constraint through the concept of liver chi stagnation.
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And the phrase does not mean that there is necessarily something wrong with your anatomical
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It describes a traditional pattern of constriction rather than free movement.
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You can almost see why generations of practitioners connected this idea with people who sigh frequently,
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tighten their shoulders, become irritable under pressure, feel constriction in the chest,
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or unconsciously clench their jaw.
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So there's also an interesting geographical connection.
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Temple and the side of the head are traditionally associated with a gallbladder channel.
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And where do many people with jaw tension point you when they ask where the headaches
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Right there, the temples.
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So Western medicine sees the temporalis muscle and trigeminal sensory pathways.
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Chinese medicine sees an area where constrained energy may be expressing itself.
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Different maps, same human being.
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And perhaps the question that both maps are inviting us to ask is why are you still contracting
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when the demand has passed?
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And this matters because many of us think, me included, that relaxation happens automatically.
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And we believe that if we're no longer doing anything stressful, the body should simply
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But that is not always what happens.
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You finish the meeting and the jaw remains tight.
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The children finally go to bed and your shoulders remain elevated.
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You lie down and the tongue is tense.
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The forehead stays contracted.
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And you may not consciously feel stressed anymore, but your body has not yet received
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the message that the moment requiring vigilance has ended.
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And I think traditional Chinese medicine can offer a beautiful idea here.
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Health is not simply the absence of stress.
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It is the ability to move between activation and restoration.
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And we sometimes demonize tension.
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But tension is useful.
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And you need your jaw muscles to chew.
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You need muscular tone to speak.
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You need sympathetic activation when something demands your attention.
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The problem is not activation.
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The problem is activation without release.
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And traditional Chinese medicine continually returns to balance between opposite qualities,
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movement and stillness.
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Expansion and contraction.
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Activity and rest.
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Your jaw also lives inside that rhythm.
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It closes and then it must open.
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It works and then it must rest.
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If your jaw spends 15 hours a day hovering near contraction and continues contracting
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intermittently throughout the night, the rhythm becomes one-sided.
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So it does not mean Chinese medicine proves why you have a migraine.
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It gives us a philosophical question worth listening to.
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Where in your life and where in your body have you forgotten the second half of the rhythm?
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And we can bring in another Eastern tradition here as well.
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Our Ayurveda often interprets symptoms through qualities rather than through one isolated
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So a person who feels wired, light sleeping, restless, sensitive or unable to settle may
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traditionally be described very differently from someone whose headaches feel hot, sharp,
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irritable and inflammatory.
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And again, these are traditional frameworks, not neurological diagnosis.
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But both traditions encourage something that modern chronic pain care is also rediscovering.
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The whole system matters.
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And this is particularly relevant with clenching because a jaw can become a kind of unconscious
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You may not remember feeling tense at three o'clock yesterday afternoon.
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Your muscles might.
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You may tell yourself, I'm fine.
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And your jaw says, I've been holding for six hours over here.
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That does not mean the pain is psychological.
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Muscle contraction is physical.
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Sensor input is physical.
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Migraine biology is physical.
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But human beings do not have a separate emotional body and a physical body.
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There's just one nervous system experiencing all of it.
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And this brings us back to the tongue.
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Traditional practices often pay enormous attention to the tongue.
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Its appearance, its movement, its relationship to breathing, its position in the mouth.
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And just as a little side note, since around 2020, I've been using the tongue as one additional
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piece of information to help complete the picture when we're trying to understand someone's
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So in the Migraine Heroes app, with the green background and the yellow heart in the brain.
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And honestly, I found it incredibly useful.
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The tongue is such an interesting part of the body because it is closely connected to
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the nervous system involved in swallowing, breathing, and digestion.
[20:07]
It can sometimes give us additional clues about what may be going on more broadly in
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And in traditional Chinese medicine, of course, tongue observation has always been used for
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centuries as one way of looking for patterns of imbalance.
[20:20]
And this is why we incorporate it in the app, in the Migraine Heroes app.
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When you go through the onboarding questions, we ask you a picture of your tongue and compare
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those observations with the rest of your symptoms.
[20:30]
It is not there to diagnose a condition from your tongue alone, but it gives us another
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data point and a starting pattern to explore.
[20:39]
So this pattern of Bruxism is oftentimes called state of tension and overload, which corresponds
[20:45]
to that liver tissue stagnation.
[20:46]
And I love it because it's incredibly fast, the tongue picture, immediately available,
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and it costs you nothing to observe.
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And sometimes a very simple clue can help us start connecting the dots that otherwise
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feel completely unrelated.
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And so modern dentistry approaches the subject very differently.
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But there's something almost beautifully practical about using the tongue as an anchor
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for awareness, not because there's one magical tongue posture, but because your tongue is
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available to you all day.
[21:12]
You do not need a device.
[21:14]
You do not need an appointment.
[21:15]
You simply notice, where is my tongue?
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And are my teeth touching?
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Is my jaw doing work that nobody asked it to do?
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And the tiny moment of awareness creates a choice.
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So instead of clench, clench, clench, clench, there's suddenly notice and release.
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And perhaps 10 minutes later, notice and release.
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And that is how a nervous system learns, not through one dramatic intervention, but sometimes
[21:41]
through hundreds of very small corrections.
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Now, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote repeatedly about softness overcoming hardness.
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And I think the Zhou gives us a wonderful physical version of this idea.
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When something hurts, our instinct is often to attack it.
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Push harder, massage harder, stretch harder, find the knot and destroy it.
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But if the problem is a system that already knows how to contract too well, perhaps another
[22:08]
aggressive stimulus is not always what it needs.
[22:10]
Perhaps the skill you're trying to teach is softness.
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A jaw that can work when needed.
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Now, here's your experiment for today.
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Several times during the day, especially when you are working, driving, cooking or looking
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at your phone, check your jaw and quietly ask, are my teeth touching?
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Unless you're chewing or swallowing, gently allow them to separate.
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Let your tongue rest comfortably against or near the roof of your mouth without forcing
[22:40]
Soften your lips and feel whether the muscles beside your cheeks can reverse even 5%.
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If the jaw feels sore, try 10 minutes of comfortable warmth followed by one or two more minutes
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of gentle fingertip massage over the thick cheek muscle and temples.
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No aggressive pressure and no percussion device against your head or neck.
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Then observe rather than judge.
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Does your familiar headache change after chewing, after a stressful concentration period, or
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on mornings when your jaw feels tired?
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Conservative approaches such as reducing unnecessary clenching, gentle exercise, heat or cold,
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and appropriate physical therapy are generally recommended before treatments that permanently
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alter the teeth or bite.
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And one final thought.
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Do not make your jaw another thing you have to control perfectly.
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The goal is not to spend your entire day anxiously checking your mouth.
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The goal is to become curious enough to notice a pattern you may have been missing.
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Because your jaw may not be the cause of your migraine, but for some migraine heroes, it
[23:47]
may be an overlooked part of the load.
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And sometimes, reducing one part of the load is enough to give the nervous system a little
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So just answer these in your head.
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Do you ever wake up with your jaw feeling tired?
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Do you catch your teeth touching when you're concentrating?
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And does your familiar temple pain change when you chew or clench?
[24:11]
And if any of those sounded familiar, you're far from the only one.
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The Migraine Heroes app starts by uncovering your patterns, and your jaw is one of the
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things we ask about right at the beginning.
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Because what matters isn't only whether your jaw is involved, it's how it fits in
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everything else going on for you.
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That's what the Migraine Heroes method looks at.
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And you can see your starting pattern before you even create an account.
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And if you just caught yourself unclenching your jaw while listening, that's a lovely
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Let your shoulders drop too, and take a long, gentle sigh of relief.
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That's all for today.
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I hope this episode added one more piece to your migraine puzzle.
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Migraine is complex, but it's not random.
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Every time we understand a little more of it, we move one step closer to lasting relief.
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I should like to apply what we've discussed to your own life.
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You can find us by searching Migraine Heroes in the App Store or Google Play.
[25:09]
Look for the green icon with the love heart in the brain.
[25:12]
Your body has a story to tell.
[25:14]
Let's keep listening.
[25:16]
I will be back with you soon.
