Seven Things Dental Care Has in Common With Housecleaning

Like your home, your mouth is a focal point for your health and well-being. When it isn’t maintained properly, you can feel off balance, ungrounded, insecure. Let’s have a look at the importance of good dental care from this perspective.

The Significance of Your Mouth in Your Life

Your mouth is a central point of exchange in your body. You smile to greet other people. You use your mouth to say hello and goodbye and engage in conversation. It’s the place where you utter your brilliant thoughts and share your visions for the future. It’s also the entryway for nourishment and sustenance, in the form of delicious food, and thirst quenching beverages. Finally, it’s a source of pleasurable exchange, when you kiss a love one. All of these things require a mouth that is healthy and pain-free, in order to get the most out of your life.

Your Home, and How it Compares With Your Mouth

Like your mouth, your home is a central point of exchange. It’s your base of operations, the place where you go to rest and regenerate. It’s also the place where you can find balance, where you can nourish yourself and prepare for all of your life’s activities. And it’s a place of pleasure, where you can share with loved ones. But when your home is dirty and in disrepair, it can detract from the quality of your life.

Dental Care is Like Housecleaning

When we really begin to look at caring for our home and caring for our mouths, we realize just how many ways these processes reflect one another. Here are seven ways you can compare good dental care to efficient housecleaning:

1) Dirt Builds Up: It’s a fact of life. Everything gets dirty. Your teeth, your gums, your tongue –they all build up bacteria from decaying food and germs that enter through the mouth. Just like we need to wash floors and sinks and keep our bathrooms clean at home, we need to make sure we brush and floss our teeth as well as our tongues, and keep the inside of our mouths rinsed and free of outside materials.

2) You Need a Schedule: It’s important to make oral care as well as house cleaning an easy part of your daily routine. Just as you wash the dishes after you prepare a meal, make your beds and do your laundry regularly, and set certain times a week (or every two weeks, or every month) to do the bigger chores, scheduling specific times to brush your teeth is essential. We recommend first thing in the morning and right before bed, as well as after meals or any particularly sugary or sticky snack that leaves significant residue in the mouth.

Regular check-ups are like those bigger chores that also have to get done periodically. We suggest every six months, in order to stay on top of any problems that might be developing and get a professional cleaning.

3)It Helps to Make a Good Impression: When company comes, we clean up. Likewise, we don’t want to greet others with a dirty mouth. Clean teeth and fresh breath are an essential part of making a good impression on others.

4)It Makes You Feel Better: Who likes sitting around in a dirty house? It makes it hard to relax if you’re surrounded by piles of dirty laundry or a sink full of dishes. A clean mouth, like a clean environment, contributes to a sense of calm and well-being.

5) It Helps Your Confidence: A clean, well-functioning environmenthelps provide a sense of order that can be a real confidence booster. It helps to look around and see the physical evidence of what you are capable of doing. It becomes an example on which you can build other accomplishments. Likewise, a fresh, clean mouth is an essential component of personal confidence. How many of you pop a breath mint into your mouths just before a date or an important job interview? We all know how it puts a little kick into your step to know that your teeth look nice and your breath smells good.

6)Good Maintenance Helps You Be More Productive: When your teeth are functioning properly, you can eat properly, speak freely and generally get things done. It’s hard to concentrate on anything if you are suffering from tooth pain. If one of your teeth is cracked, it’s hard to chew. Just like if the heat in your house is broken, or the water isn’t flowing properly, or an important appliance like your refrigerator is broken, things will not go smoothly at all. Good maintenance, like cleaning, is an essential component in tooth and home care.