The jaw muscle, or masseter, is one of the most powerful muscles in your body, and can apply enormous amounts of force when clenched. This is useful for chewing stale bagels, but inconvenient when chronic stress causes us to chew our own teeth.

I grind my teeth at night, and my dentist has made me wear a stylish little piece of plastic when sleeping to prevent me from wearing my teeth into a fine dust over the course of the next few decades. Frankly, though, I would rather just train myself to stop randomly clenching my jaw.

Here are a few tricks I’ve learned. Obviously none of this is medical advice, as I have no qualifications; it’s a combination of personal experience and suggestions from people with more expertise.

  • Right under your ear and slightly behind your earlobe is a soft spot. You DON’T want to put pressure there, but directly in front of that—i.e., closer to the front of your face—is a bit of the jaw muscle that is fantastic for digging your fingers into to wring out jaw tension. It helps to do this with your jaw slightly open too.
  • There are some muscles on the front of your chin that also like to tighten up. Massaging these seems to help relieve some jaw tension also.
  • A massage therapist taught me this: you can put a few fingers, palm downwards, on your bottom teeth and sort of bounce your jaw up and down, almost as though you’re bouncing a ball. The trick is getting the hang of letting your jaw go rather than resisting the movement of your hand.
  • The place where your jaw joins your face is also where the base of your skull joins your neck. If you put your hand just below the ridge on the back of your head and move your head around a bit, you can feel this. Massaging those muscles around the joining point seems to help with jaw tension.