What does this mean?
Just under your temple lies the temporalis, a powerful chewing muscle that pulls your lower jaw upwards. If you clench your teeth during the day or grind them at night, this muscle tires and leaves a dull, pressing ache in the temple. Pain that gets worse when you chew hard food, talk for a long time or chew gum points towards this origin.
In a tension-type headache the pain does not stay in the temple; it wraps around a wide area from your forehead to the back of your neck, and it is unrelated to jaw movement. The detail that marks out a muscle origin is a simple one: if pressing your temple with a finger wakes the familiar pain, and if you can feel a muscle harden at that spot when you clench your teeth, the source is most likely the muscle.
Temple pain that starts after the age of fifty and is unlike anything you have had before deserves separate attention. When tenderness over the temple artery, a scalp that hurts when you comb your hair, a jaw that tires while chewing so that you have to stop, and blurred vision occur together, inflammation arising in an artery may be considered. This is not a picture to wait out.
Temple pain is not the sign of a single illness; it may come from a muscle, or it may be linked to one of the headache types or to a problem in an artery. The headings below are the conditions most often mentioned alongside this pain.
Likely causes
What helps at home?
- Give up chewing gum and hard, chewy foods for a few days; resting the muscle also shows you whether the pain is related to chewing.
- Check now and then during the day whether your teeth are touching; with your lips closed, your upper and lower teeth should stay apart.
- Warmth on the temple may relax the muscle; but if there is swelling over the artery, or marked tenderness that increases when you touch it, do not apply heat or massage.
- If you need painkillers on more than a few days a week, look into where the pain comes from rather than raising the dose; frequent use can itself become a separate reason the pain keeps going.
- You are over fifty and your temple pain is unlike anything you have had before
- There is swelling or redness over the temple artery, or marked tenderness when you touch it
- Your vision has blurred, you are seeing double, or one eye has briefly blacked out
- Your jaw tires while you are chewing and you have to stop for a rest
- The pain comes with a fever, unexplained weight loss, or a scalp that hurts to touch
Frequently asked questions
- Is my temple pain coming from clenching my teeth?
- Only an examination can tell for certain. Even so, muscle pain has familiar markers: it is more noticeable in the morning, it builds with tiredness and stress through the day, pressing the temple wakes the same pain, and it gets stronger the more hard food you chew. Flattened tooth surfaces, tooth marks along the edge of your tongue and a white line inside your cheek may point the same way.
- Who should I see about temple pain?
- If the pain changes with how you use your jaw, increases when you chew, or comes with noises, locking or tooth sensitivity in the jaw joint, a dentist is a sensible place to start. If it comes with nausea, discomfort in bright light, changes in your vision or neurological symptoms, a neurologist is the one who assesses it. Temple pain that is new after the age of fifty needs to be seen the same day.
- Will a night guard clear up my temple pain?
- A night guard is used to protect the teeth and the jaw joint from the load they take overnight, and in people whose muscle origin has been supported by an examination it may ease morning pain. If clenching is not the only cause of the pain, it may not be enough on its own. Having a guard made without an examination, going only by the symptom, is the wrong order to do things in.
This content is for general information and does not replace an in-person examination. Symptoms overlap between conditions, and a diagnosis can only be made clinically.