Q:Is it bad if I haven't brushed my teeth in months. Like, they're perfectly fine though and I just keep forgetting, but is it bad or... Because I'm sure ages ago it wasn't a thing. thanks. :3

Anonymous

Great question, and you’re very smart to ask me, because before I became an author, I worked for many years as a professional dentist.

Is an example of a lie.

But I have had many cavities and root canals, all of which are due to poor oral hygiene when I was younger, so: When dentists tell you that brushing your teeth is important to your physical well-being, they are not scamming you. Brushing your teeth:

1. Saves you money, by making it less likely that you will have to get a $2,000 root canal in the future.

2. Possibly makes you overall less likely to die. 

3. Improves mouth freshness.

My guess—and I might be wrong—is that in fact it’s not just that you keep forgetting, but that there’s some like little mental block that makes it difficult for you to actually begin the process of brushing your teeth. (This is a pretty common thing, actually. It happens to me a lot.)

So here’s the best way to overcome this block in my experience: You have to acknowledge that the thing you are about to do, even though there is nothing technically difficult about it, is extremely hard for you to do at this particular moment. You know that it is extremely hard because you have failed to do it on many previous occasions.

You don’t need to think about why it is so difficult; you just have to accept that it is difficult.

(I have to do this all the time when it comes to doing the dishes, which is not a hard chore, but I get very anxious about it and overwhelmed and my brain just says THE DISHES WILL BE THE HARDEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED, and I have to tell my brain: Okay. You are right. The dishes will be very hard. But I am going to do them! I am going to do this very difficult thing!)

So then once you have accepted in a non-judgmental way that for whatever reason this thing you have to do is very difficult for you, you can then psych yourself up to do it, and then you do it: You’re brushing your teeth, and you spend a solid minute or two brushing all the surfaces, and then you spit and rinse your mouth out, and you have just done a really difficult thing.

Maybe the world does not recognize it as difficult. But you know! You have just done something really significant that was not easy for you. And in my experience, if you go through this process—acknowledging the difficulty, psyching yourself up, doing the thing—for a while, you will find that it gets easier and easier and the mental block gets easier to live with.

So that is my advice.

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