Your tongue serves many functions. Your tongue is the source of your sense of taste. It plays a vital role in your ability to chew, swallow and speak.
Even when your tongue is doing nothing but resting in your mouth, it can have a significant effect, for good or bad. Specifically, the resting position of your tongue can play an important role in your appearance.
Experts explain this relationship and how we can use it to change facial growth and shape, even in adults.
In the Resting Position, Your Tongue Should Remain Resistant to the Roof of Your Mouth with Your Mouth Closed!
Oral resting posture refers to what your mouth and tongue do when you are not eating or talking. The ideal oral resting position is as follows;
The lips are closed, the teeth are closed and the tongue rests lightly on the upper palate. Failure to achieve this posture can have a variety of different effects on you. In children, it can lead to suboptimal development of the jaw and facial structure. It can cause narrowing of the dental arch and predispose you to problems such as developing sleep breathing disorders, such as sleep apnoea. It can even affect your appearance, leading to a flat profile or severely recessed jaw and protruding upper teeth.
In contrast, being able to maintain a preferred oral resting posture can have many positive effects, especially for children, who will develop wider arches and encourage straighter teeth.
You may recognise that you have the wrong tongue posture if you find yourself with your tongue under your mouth or resting against your teeth. Constant pressure on the teeth can cause the teeth to shift, tilt, cause a bad bite and can even lead to a habit of teeth grinding. Those who put their tongues under the mouth may suffer from more neck pain, jaw pain, and overall poor body posture. In addition, poor tongue posture can change someone’s appearance and cause the face to take on a longer, flatter shape or cause the chin, forehead to protrude forward.
Can You Correct Your Bad Tongue Posture?
The good news is that you can work to improve your tongue posture. The first step in correcting bad tongue posture is to find the right place where your tongue should rest. You can do this in one of two ways.
Slide it
Place the tip of your tongue behind your upper teeth and then slide it backwards. You should feel a point where the roof of your mouth slopes upwards. The area just before this slope is the main tongue resting point.
Do not smile
The other way to find your ideal tongue position is to smile really wide, raise your eyebrows and try to swallow without clenching your teeth. You should feel your tongue rise to the roof of your mouth and come to its ideal resting position.
Don’t expect your tongue posture to change overnight like any other habit. Keep practicing these two exercises to remind yourself to consciously keep your tongue in this ideal position. Over time, muscle memory will replace bad, old postural habits with new, correct positions.
