Fellow Tongue Grinders:
I have had this addiction for two years now, although I feel I am starting to conquer it. It started when I had a filling done on the inside of my lower front tooth. My tongue found a small ridge on the inside of that tooth and also found a strange satisfaction in grinding away. The more damaged my tongue got, the more sensitive it became and strangely the more masochistic satisfaction I seemed to get.
I guess this is a bit like tongue thrusting (which is what little kids do) in the sense that the satisfying discomfort produced may also be the same for kids too and that is why they are compelled to continue.
My dentist polished the little ridge of the filling, which helped for a bit, until my tongue was traumatized (ulcerated?) a bit more and was therefore sensitive enough to feel ridges that almost don't exist. While she hadn't come across this predicament before, she said that the tongue is a muscle and has muscle memory like any other muscle. In other words, once it gets into the habit of grinding, it will keep going without any conscious effort. No surprise there.
For other reasons (apparently I have an aggressive bite), she made a mouth guard for me and said it might help my tongue grinding too. And it does help, in a way. Every night that I wear it (and I don't particularly like wearing it), my tongue heals a bit and then through the next day all is reversed as the habitual grinding undoes the overnight healing.
At one point I reasoned that if I could just give my tongue a chance to heal for a few days, the sensitivity would go away enough that I might kick the habit. So on the next long weekend, I wore the mouthguard for 72 hours straight (except when eating, of course, and if I had something to say). My tongue healed perhaps 80% of the way back to normal but within a couple of hours of habitual unconcious grinding, I was right back where I started the long weekend.
I am starting to think that, like smoking, alcoholism and incessant scratching, nail-biting and baby finger-sucking, this is just a bad habit from which the body gets a weird kind of pleasure/reward, withstanding that, at the same time, it is damaging to our physical selves (and social selves too, perhaps).
So the cure?
Train my body to stop, I guess. If I could make the tongue suffer an electrical zap like a dog gets when it approaches an electrical fence, I bet I would drop the habit pretty quickly. Of course, this is not practical. But lately I have started every morning with an hour of consciously keeping my tongue away from my lower front teeth. I don't get a lot else done in the hour and sometimes during the day I find myself back with the old ways, but it gradually seems to be a fading habit. As someone earlier mentioned, tilting the head back pulls the tongue away and seems to be a good way of telling my tongue "OK, I am in charge here, and this is going to stop".
Billions of people don't have this habit and for all my life except the last two years, I was one of them.
I hope this is helpful to someone out there.
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