EARS RINGING? TURN DOWN THE VOLUME!
If you can’t stop the gum chewing, hard candy crunching or nail biting (eewwwww), then you can at least become more aware of whether or not you have a tendency to chew more on one side of your mouth than the other.
Just like we are arm or leg dominant, many of us are facially dominant as well. We might have a tendency to use one side of the jaw more than the other. Or we may have asymmetry in the structure of the bones of our face which could lead to strength imbalances in the muscles of the jaw…especially the Masseter muscle.
This muscle is the PRIMARY muscle responsible for chewing. It happens to be the strongest muscle in the body relative to the power it produces for its size.
But how can it contribute to ringing in the ear? If you don’t mind getting geeky with me…here it goes.
When you bite down hard (due to muscle activity), it stimulates somatosensory nerves (soma = body / sensory = sensation) around the lower jaw. These nerves project up to an area of the brain responsible for locating environmental sounds. So, when you overstimulate these nerves, you can overstimulate the sound responses that your brain is picking up.
Let me know if you can find tenderness in this muscle and notice if one side is more tender than the other.
👇🏼Comment below with your experience. If you have tinnitus, can you modulate it with massaging this muscle? TRY IT and let me know! 🙏🏼