4 Best Mouth Guards to Stop Teeth Grinding

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In this post we’re detailing the 4 best mouth guards to stop teeth grinding!

Quick Picks: Top Mouth Guard Services 

Keep reading for more detailed reviews and a comparison of these services and others.

Why Mouth Guards Are Essential To Stop Teeth Grinding

Teeth grinding can cause serious damage to your teeth, which is why it’s important to wear a dental mouth guard at night.

As we explained in our post comparing dentist custom mouth guards vs. store bought mouth guards, many store brand mouth guards won’t cut it – ideally, custom formed dental mouth guards are the best solution for how to stop teeth grinding.

Professional custom mouth guards from your dentist can cost anywhere from $400-$800, but one little-known secret is that you can actually order these custom mouth guards yourself for 70-90% less.

We will show you how and which teeth grinding mouth guards are best.

How to Order A Custom Teeth Grinding Mouthguard

You can get the same dentist-quality custom mouth guards for teeth grinding (at a much cheaper price) by buying online through private dental labs (often you’re dealing with the very same labs that create mouth guards for dentist offices).

You simply place an order through the dental lab, use the kit they send to take a mold impression of your teeth, and send the mold back for them to create your custom teeth grinding mouth guard.

These mouth guards will not only stop you from grinding your teeth, but will also help align your jaw into a normal, natural position that will fight teeth grinding long term.

4 Best Mouth Guards For Teeth Grinding

Below are our top picks for the best mouth guards to stop teeth grinding. These dental mouth guards are all dentist office quality, but are offered through private sellers so you can get the same high-quality, reliable, custom-fitted mouth guard for a fraction of the cost.

1. Pro Teeth Guard

pro teethguard 2019

Pro Teeth Guard is a professional dental lab based out of San Diego County, California. They actually make dental night guards for dentists and their office orders, so you know your teeth are in good hands.

They use the same FDA-approved professional materials for their online orders as they do for their dentist office orders.

How Pro Teeth Guard Works

1. Place an order from the Pro Teeth Guard website, and you’ll receive an easy-to-use impression mold kit, along with simple instructions.

2. Take an impression of your teeth with the included putty material, which will capture the exact positioning and shape of your teeth.

3. Send your teeth impression mold back to Pro Teeth Guard with the pre-addressed, pre-paid packaging provided. Your custom dental guard will be crafted by experienced dental experts, and each dental night guard is inspected by one of their head dental lab managers, who have 20+ years experience in the dental industry.

4. Sit back and wait for your custom night guard to arrive in the mail.

Other Advantages:

  • 110% Money Back Guarantee. (that’s right, if you aren’t happy with their product, you’ll get your money back + extra!)
  • Dental Professionals. Pro Teeth Guard has 10+ years experience creating night guards, dentures, and crowns for dentists, so you’re dealing with real pros.

2. TeethNightGuard.com

teethnightguard

TeethNightGuard.com is a private dental company specializing in dentist lab-quality night guards for teeth grinding, clenching, and TMJ.

As with other offerings, TeethNightGuard.com offers 3 different types of mouth guards depending on whether you are a light, moderate, or severe teeth grinder.

You’ll also have to decide if you want to go with a top or bottom mouthguard.

Other benefits of Sparkling White Smiles:

3. J&S Dental Lab

mouth guard for teeth grinding

J&S Dental Lab offers a number of highly-rated dental night guards to prevent teeth grinding.

Their dental mouth guards are all available on Amazon, which provides an added degree of convenience.

J&S Dental has a number of different products based on:

  • Whether you want a top or bottom fitted dental guard (choose whichever is comfortable for you).
  • The severity of your teeth grinding (products vary based on light, moderate, or severe teeth grinding. The guards built for severe grinding are thicker).

J&S Dental Night Guard Design

J&S Dental Lab night guards feature a hard outer surface that provides top-notch protection and long-lasting wear, with a soft inner section, ensuring a comfortable fit. The night guards are made of quality materials and are BPA-free.

How J&S Dental Works

J&S Dental Lab sends you an impression kit with 3 different mouth tray sizes for you to choose from. Using the putty provided, you take an impression of your teeth and send the mold back to the J&S Dental Lab (postage included).

Other Advantages:

  • J&S Dental offers a “No Questions Asked Money-Back Guarantee”
  • Easy step-by-step instructions to help you take an accurate mold of your teeth
  • Free dental guard adjustments + free shipping
  • Extremely positive online feedback on Amazon

J&S Dental Lab mouth guards are highly recommended, with stellar ratings and ecstatically happy customers. Even a professional dentist used J&S Dental Lab to order his own mouth guard when he was unable to order one through his own office – and he loved it!

4. Pro-form
mouth guard for teeth grinding

Pro-form is another highly recommended custom dental guard kit that can be found on Amazon. Pro-form’s BPA-free dental mouth guards come in a variety of sizes and thicknesses, allowing you to have a mouth guard that can be worn during the day as well as at night.

Pro-form also includes the impression kit, which you send back to Pro-form in order to obtain your custom fit mouth guard.

With Pro-form, choose from 2 different materials:

  • Soft EVA material: Ideal for normal grinding and clenching, providing a soft feel and cushioning for when you grind or clench your teeth.
  • Hard EVA material: Made of harder material designed for normal to extreme teeth grinders and/or clenchers. These guards are made of tough, durable, hard EVA material with no give or cushioning.

Both products come in a clear material and are 3mm thick to provide mouth comfort and durability.

However, if you want a dental guard you can wear during the day, Pro-form also offers guard in:

  • 2mm
  • 2.5mm

These thinner dental guards are great for daytime and nighttime use.

Other Alternatives: Boil & Bite Night Guards

Boil and bite night guards tend to be less comfortable than the custom molded night guards mentioned above, but they’re also quite a bit cheaper.

If you need a night guard ASAP and are looking for a quick solution, the guards below may be worth a try.

See our video here of the boil-and-bite nightguards we tried:

Option 1: Dentek

Dentek boil-and-bite nightguards can be purchased at many convenience stores. They’re cheap and easy to make. They’re also the least effective, at least in our experience.

Why? Well, they aren’t much thinner than sports guards. If you have ever tried sleeping with a sports guard in your mouth, you know that’s no easy task!

While Dentek nightguards are more flexible than sports guards, they are still quite thick considering this is something you’re supposed to sleep with in your mouth all night.

Whenever I’ve tried to sleep with a Dentek nightguard, nearly half the time I end up giving up in the middle of the night and throwing the guard onto my nightstand in frustration. They’re really just too thick to be comfortable for most folks.

Option 2: Brux

The Brux is another boil-and-bite nightguard, but it’s quite different than the Dentek.

First of all, the entire shape is quite different – rather than going around your entire mouth, the Brux night guard only creates a barrier at the front of your teeth.

brux night guard

It’s definitely more comfortable than the Dentek guard, but I find the shape strange.

While I imagine this cushioning between the top of your teeth prevents you from shutting your mouth, and therefore stops the back of your teeth from rubbing, it still seems like a strange design and I can’t help but question its effectiveness.

Option 3: SOVA

SOVA is another boil-and-bite guard, but the results are quite different than most boil-and-bites.

sovabox

Perhaps I shouldn’t be calling SOVA a boil-and-bite guard – because it’s not, technically speaking. While it functions similar to a boil-and-bite, with Sova, you don’t boil the water. Instead, you heat it to hot-but-not-scalding 170 degrees.

Rather than being composed of a rubber chunk you bite into and squish into shape, the SOVA is a thin, wide piece of material polymer that you fold up around your teeth to mold into shape.

When I first saw the SOVA, I had my doubts. It looks really different than most boil-and-bite night guards, and I really wondered how effective it could possibly be.

Ultimately, I was completely blown away by SOVA. It molds incredibly well to your teeth, providing a completely custom shape that is by far the thinnest and most comfortable boil-and-bite style guard on the market. It’s incredibly comfortable and beats out competition by a long shot, at least IMO.

So how does it work? You place the white, hard SOVA plastic piece that initially arrives into a pot of 140-degree water. Soon, you’ll see the material change from white to translucent.

Once the guard has become translucent, you pick it out of the water and mold it around your teeth as the guard slowly begins to harden. After about 30 seconds, the guard will be solid, shaped to your mouth!

The process can be a bit of a trial and error – during my first handful of attempts, I was sucking too much air through during the hardening process, resulting in a guard that was too tight.

Other times, I had a hard time keeping the edges up around my teeth as the material hardened, or found the sides to be uneven.

Luckily, the Sova guard is very forgiving – you can re-form the guard up to 20 times without issue! It also softens up very quickly in hot water, so reforming over and over again wasn’t a huge pain at all.

Eventually, I ended up with a night guard I could be proud of that was even and comfortable.

Out of all the boil-and-bite nightguards I tried, SOVA was the most comfortable and easiest to wear while getting a full night of uninterrupted sleep. I found myself needing to remove the Dentex guard several nights throughout the week I tried it due to discomfort and frustration.

Curious about the SOVA? Read our full review of the SOVA dental night guard!

Best Dental Night Guards

That concludes our list of the best dental night guards! If you have experience with another brand of professional, affordable dental night guards, please let us know in the comments and we will consider adding other qualified custom night guard vendors to the list!

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about the author:
Meg Mars
Meg is a writer who is passionate about healthy eating. From Whole30 and South Beach Diet, to paleo and intermittent fasting, she's experimented with several healthy eating regiments and is passionate about helping readers find the perfect food plan match for their lifestyles.

17 thoughts on “4 Best Mouth Guards to Stop Teeth Grinding”

  1. Pro Teeth Guard are a terrible company. They called and left me a voice mail stating that the technician can’t be bothered making my guard, it is “extra effort” and will slow production of other orders. Wow!!

    Reply
    • Sorry to hear that Bekah! Any chance you can explain a bit more about your experience so that others can try to avoid a similar situation?

      Reply
  2. I ordered a mouth guard from J & S dental lab through Amazon. Thought was a good deal and why not give it a try. Sent back the kit and got the bottom mouth guard; did not fit well so let company know. Was sent another kit to make casting. Sent back to company but kit was lost in transit through mail. Not J & S fault but thought that I would lose the money put into purchasing since they don’t guarantee shipping. Heard from one of the main managers who apologized and gave me a credit for purchase price then OFFERED to make another bite guard at NO COST. What nice people I thought as I did not even ask for this. Well, was sent confirmation email about shipping that I should receive the new mouth guard on 04/17 and to my astonishment that guard was sent to Orlando, FL as someone at lab put WRONG LABEL on the bite plane. The entire dealings with this company have been a nightmare; complete and UTTER NIGHTMARE. Wish I would never have even heard of this company. They were nice and kind to offer to make another guard at no charge but as is anything in life; nothing is truly free. Well I am ending my involvement with J & S as I have WASTED so much time and effort on this; just going to go to local dentist as NOTHING is truly worth all of this. W as great that they did credit me right away.

    Reply
  3. Appreciate reading through your post and comparison of various dental grind guards. Our product is similar but a new technology, with 60+ million Americans grinding their teeth its clear that Bruxism is a very common root cause of many other symptoms – some you’d never immediately associate with teeth grinding. TMJ headaches, neck and shoulder pain, migraines, sleep apnea worsening, and so on. With the right mouth guard, it can transform your life very quickly.

    Reply
  4. I used a Clear Splint night guard for the first- and last, time last night. Fits great BUT the taste is awful. The material they use to make this needs to be changed into a product that can be used. They should go back into the lab and make a new version without the awful taste.

    Reply
    • I am OK w/ the taste of it, but I naively paid way too much by ordering it through my dentist instead of online. Over a few months of use, mine has accumulated a thick layer of calcium buildup (we have very hard water), but cleaning options seem to be very limited.

      Reply
  5. Hello from NC – thank you for your reviews – am also considering Sentinel and since it’s July, was wondering if you had any updates about that company and their night guard products? Thanks so much. 🙂

    Reply
    • Sorry, no experience with them, but if you do go with Sentinel let us know how it went! I’ll work on getting to them at some point for sure.

      Reply
  6. Hi! I’m looking for a night time mouth guard made of silicone or such as I’m allergic to acrylic/acrylate. Do you know of any such products? Thank you!

    Reply
  7. Hi, I bought the Bruxism Anti Snoring mouth piece.
    There is a hard plastic that holds the top and bottom. Am I supposed keep the hard plastic in the mouth or is it only for storing purpose. Someone please let me know.
    Joe

    Reply
  8. Hello!
    Do you know if after some time the silicone starts degrading and releasing micro particles in the mouth?
    There is a discussion about this when relating to baby bottles.

    Reply

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