Habit #7 — Pearly Whites

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I had my first dentist appointment in over seven years just a couple weeks ago. I wish that I could say that I hadn’t gone for some extremely legitimate reason — like maybe I didn’t have insurance or had to choose between that or keeping a roof over my head — but the truth is that I just didn’t make time for it. Seven years with free dental insurance and no other serious financial obligations and I never went to the dentist because I just didn’t make the time for it.

Majorly lame of me.

Of course, when you’re a kid you never like going to the dentist. For me it was always scary because they’d keep telling me that if I didn’t brush and floss twice a day every day my teeth would fall out and I would die from some sort of mouth-borne illness (or at least be single and alone for the rest of my life).

As I grew older, I figured those were just scare tactics they use to force little kids into good dental hygiene for the rest of their lives. I brushed regularly, used mouthwash occasionally (read: date nights), but never flossed because I thought it was annoying, and I felt pretty good about my dental health.

When I finally went to the dentist the other week, I was feeling pretty confident that I’d figured out their game and pretty much told them so, being totally honest about my habits on my intake survey. I thought that as a fellow adult now I would receive the respect I deserved as a peer and be spared the scare tactics about the importance of rubbing a waxy piece of string between my teeth until my gums bleed.

I was wrong.

I got just the opposite, in fact. For the first time in my life the hygienist measured (yes, literally measured) the distance between every single tooth and my gum line to check for signs of infection beneath my gums.

That got my attention.

Maybe it was just that I was taken off guard because I was expecting something different. Or, maybe it was the prospect of having a part of my jaw removed because the bone got infected. But I decided after that appointment that I needed to step up my dental game.

So, for this habit, I am going to be more proactive with my dental hygiene. I am going to brush twice (not once or twice) each day and floss every morning. The dentist also told me that my teeth are abnormally close together (compliments, in part, of my lovely wisdom teeth) and that I would need to make a fluoride rinse a part of my regular routine to keep any potential cavities from spreading from tooth to tooth. So I am going to do that each morning as well.

Brush every morning and night, floss and rinse with mouthwash every morning. It’s pretty basic, but it’s a habit I need to develop before I turn into a toothless old man.

What basic habits have you been neglecting that you should develop? (Please, let me know in the comments, it may help me feel better about my waxy-string phobia.)