Flossing Is the Primary Dental Care Action
Flossing Is the Primary Dental Care Action
This post is a more engaging read than it sounds, I promise
Recount, if you’re willing to spare a moment, your nighttime routine. Everyone’s is probably a little different — maybe you take a multivitamin; maybe you put on pajamas or perhaps go to bed naked, like a fucking sociopath might; maybe you read a good book, or doom scroll for hours on TikTok1.
Whatever your routine, it surely includes “brushing my teeth”2. To be sure, this is a compound action; a stand-in for “handle my dental hygienic needs.” Obviously, this includes the actual act of brushing, but it also likely includes at least one other thing, such as flossing, using a tongue scraper, or mouthwash. But the main event — the reason for the season, baby — is the act of finally making your mouth clean by using your trusty toothbrush that you certainly replace exactly as frequently as dentists recommend.
Except that’s not the main event. Brushing is not the main fucking thing. BRUSHING YOUR TEETH IS NOT SUFFICIENT. YOU HAVE TO FUCKING FLOSS. IT IS GENUINELY MORE IMPORTANT THAN BRUSHING.
FLOSS YOUR GODDAMN TEETH, I BEG OF YOU.
Let’s back up. I’ve just screamed at you. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
Right now, you are almost certainly in one of two emotional states:
Righteous Indignation
I do floss, prick. Who the hell doesn’t floss? Why would you make this blog post? So you can condescend to me over something I already fucking do? What a waste of $5,000 per month. I thought we’d get more Lord of the Tags by now, not this tripe.
Shame-driven Defensiveness
No, I don’t regularly floss, and I know I should. But I just don’t. When I think about it, it makes me feel shame. I already know I should, prick. My walls are up because you have made me feel shame, and even though some deep part of me knows that I should accept what you’re saying, I’m probably not going to change my behavior. You have entrenched3 me. This is your fault. My dental hygiene is your fault forever now.
If you’re in the first camp, congratulations! Fuck off. If you’re in the second camp, I apologize. To help ease this entrenchment, allow me to share some of my own story.
Growing up, it was always difficult for my parents to get me to brush my teeth. More specifically, to get me to build the habit of brushing my own teeth. If they explicitly commanded me to brush my teeth, I would do so (at least most of the time). Once the “go brush your teeth, Josh” stage of my life ended, and I was trusted to brush my teeth on my own, it became very spotty. I viewed it as an annoying chore that, sure, makes sense and I should do, but I don’t wanna. What’s one night of skipping brushing going to do?
It’s not that I never brushed; I just, as a young lad, was far too comfortable skipping it here and there. I would brush before I went out, because I knew I’d have bad breath otherwise, but it’s fair to say that I generally had poor dental hygiene.
And I never flossed.
Around age 12, one of my adult front teeth was stolen by a bike handlebar, never to be seen again4. Turns out, teeth aren’t big fans of their neighbors — they eagerly took the extra space as an invitation to move on in and get some breathing room. They’re slow movers, those silly little guys, but move they did.
Therefore: braces.
I could say a lot about my experience with braces (I still have scars lining my cheeks from where they would cut me), but I’ll stick to what’s germane. Braces, you must understand, make dental hygiene much more complicated. A mass of metal and wire is not easy to brush around, especially if you’re already lazy with your brushing. Flossing becomes a million times harder; an intricate game that I attempted a few times before deciding I was never doing that shit again. If you weren’t a dedicated flosser before braces, there’s zero percent chance you flossed while you had braces.
So I still didn’t floss.
Nearly every visit to the orthodontist, they would scold me for “missing” with my brushing. They would then make me swish a pink dye in my mouth which would highlight any plaque, and instruct me to brush until all the pink was gone, so I could get a grasp for how long to brush, and how to angle it to get into the crevices obscured by the braces.
I genuinely did try with the brushing. I improved. But when the braces came off, I had dark stains on some teeth surrounding where the braces lay. These stains persisted through adulthood. Sporadic teeth whitening treatments paired with regular brushing helped remove or lessen some of them, but a few stubborn offenders refused to go.
These stains brought with them massive insecurity. I subconsciously learned how to smile such that I wouldn’t reveal the portions of my teeth that were stained5. I vividly recall, during a charity event in 20186, being told by Sean that I have “something in my teeth” and might want to go resolve it before I was on camera. I went to the bathroom to check and… oh, it’s just the stains. Mortification.
At this point, you may be wondering: why is he talking so much about stained teeth? This seems like a failure of brushing, not flossing. What’s the point here? The answer is at least partially that I like writing and want to write about myself and my life. Mostly, though, it’s this: I understand shame around one’s teeth! I am not on a high horse here. I am sharing something I have learned, and which took me a long time to come around to.
(By the way, to resolve the stain arc, my dentist finally was able to remove them roughly six months ago… by putting fillings over the stains. Brush your teeth well if you have braces is the moral of that story, I guess.)
So, by adulthood, I had finally formed a proper brushing routine. Every morning and night, barring rare exceptions. Still, no floss. Never floss. I experimented with a Waterpik for a small time, but never formed a consistent habit.
When I was 24, my dentist informed me that I had early-stage gingivitis, and they wanted to do a periodontic cleaning to flush bacteria out from under my gums and hopefully prevent it from progressing. This scared the shit out of me.
Unfortunately (though this is something I am proud to have finally worked through by my late 20s) I had a tendency to avoid confronting difficult and scary problems. This particularly applied to non-acute issues that operate on a long time scale. I’d file this under the general “procrastination” issue that my post about high school covers: I’ll deal with that tomorrow. Certainly. It won’t be as scary then as it is now, for some reason. I’ll be a different person tomorrow than I am now, for some reason. Tomorrow.
So I never had them do the periodontic treatment. This was fucking stupid, I’ll grant.
Fast forward a few years, and my dentist tells me that my gums are receding. If they were to recede too far, I would lose the teeth in that area. They tell me it is because of gingivitis7, which itself was caused by a lack of flossing.
You may think that this dire warning — you might lose your fucking teeth — would itself be sufficient to motivate change in me. To be fair, it did: I did start flossing regularly, for maybe a month. But the urgency faded. My teeth weren’t falling out. My behavior was motivated by an acute fear, not a long-term commitment to dental health. The immediacy of the issue faded in my mind, and with it went my commitment to floss.
Then, one day, I was talking to a good, old internet friend of mine — one of the few internet friends I have that I would classify as an actual friend. Seth is a fascinating character, and I’d love to write much about him but for his not being my story to tell. As I recall, he was sharing with me how he decided to get fit and hot and healthy, and off-handedly, he mentioned that it was the same process by which he decided to finally start flossing regularly.
Seth shared with me a simple idea: he simply imagined himself as the kind of perfect, awesome, got-their-shit-together person who does floss regularly. Instead of focusing on “I really should floss; I am failing by not doing so”, he simply thought, “how fucking awesome would I be if I were a flosser? Those people are better than people who don’t floss. I want to basically be better than everyone, so I’m going to floss.”
He didn’t realize it, but his little comment (an aside from what he actually wanted to talk about, which is how hot and fit and healthy he had become) immediately changed my entire perspective. I simply imagined myself, for a moment, as the kind of person who does floss, and the idea pleased me.
That day, I started flossing regularly. It hasn’t really been an issue since.
Flossing, by the way, did not reverse the damage to my gums caused by my failure to floss prior. I still had to get a gum graft surgery, which was very unpleasant, to actually resolve the issue. But it prevented it from getting worse, or at least slowed it significantly. And it will help ensure it doesn’t keep recurring.
I understand what it is like to know that you should do something, but to be blocked by the shame of not having done it thus far. To do the thing would require reckoning with the fact that you have negligently avoided doing it. I know what it’s like to fail to respond to a text or an email in a timely manner, telling myself I’d respond “later”… but later comes, and the shame has steadily grown, and to respond now would require that I acknowledge the fact that I have not responded in far too long.
I am not demanding immediate change. I am simply presenting the facts. Play with them, on your own time, in your own head, as you please. Dip your toe into flossing. You don’t have to immediately change over night. It’s not that big of a deal.
Back to reality; ope, there goes gravity.
Have I disarmed your defenses? Are you able to view me as a fellow compatriot in this difficult battle of doing the things one knows one should, as opposed to a condescending ass who views himself as your better? Hopefully. Let’s resume.
Flossing is more important than brushing8.
That’s simply the raw truth of the matter. If you could only do one thing — floss or brush — every day, it should be flossing. That sounds like a horrible idea, right? Imagine not brushing! Who the fuck could tolerate not brushing their teeth ever?
And you’re right: it is a horrible idea. To never brush would be to doom yourself to dental issues for the rest of your life. Some people may have fewer problems, and some may have more, but the base truth is the same: you obviously have to brush your damn teeth. It’s not an option to not brush.
Now consider that flossing is more important than brushing. It’s simply true. They are both obviously very important, but flossing is simply more critical.
Every bit of revulsion you feel towards the idea of never brushing is legitimate and well-placed. It just also needs to be applied, stronger, to the idea of never flossing. It’s simply not a legitimate option.
We put a lot of focus on brushing your teeth. We refer to our general dental hygiene routine as “brushing my teeth”. It’s no wonder that we’re biased in favor of thinking that, if nothing else, at least I’m brushing my teeth. I did the main thing! Those little extras like mouthwash or flossing… sure, they would help, but the main event has been completed. I can go to bed now.
A great linguistic trick has been played on all of us, though I doubt it was intentional.
Talking Shop
Hopefully, you’ve now accepted the truth that flossing is more important than brushing — that just brushing is just as bad of an idea as just using mouthwash for your primary dental hygiene technique would be. Most likely, this acceptance probably isn’t sufficient to actually change your long-term behavior, because you’re a human being and you’re likely entrenched again due to how scary what I’ve laid out is.
In this section, I’d like to answer some questions you might have, as well as explore the reality of what it looks like to start flossing. Hopefully, this will let you play around with the idea in the safety of your own mind, where you can ideally lower your defenses and — without immediately committing to any actual changes — simply explore the idea.
It’s okay
So you’re not a regular flosser. I’ve just laid out how not being a regular flosser is terrible and bad. You’re probably feeling some fear and shame.
It’s okay. You are not immediately dying. Nobody is going to come to your house and berate you. Your dentist can go fuck themselves if they scold you.
You’re not a bad person. You’re not crazy. You’re not deranged.
If you find yourself looking down on yourself because of how stupid it is to know you should do something and still not do it: get that shit out of here. That’s human! Every fucking person deals with that in one way or another, whether it be diet, exercise, dental hygiene, responding to texts, doing their homework, whatever. Everyone knows they should be doing something and are still not doing it in some area.
You’re going to be okay. You really should change, yes — I’m trying to get you to change — but it doesn’t have to be right now at the drop of a hat holy fuck let’s go I have to floss. Take a breath. Let the idea ferment in your mind for a few days. You’ve come this far, and unless you’ve been told you have a serious dental issue, it’s okay to let it go a little longer. Time spent getting comfortable with the idea — to an extent — is still time much better spent than ignoring flossing, and its importance, entirely.
Not too much longer, though, I must say. It’s not okay forever. Flossing is still more important than brushing. You cannot ignore that in perpetuity.
My guy, you’re going to be so fucking cool and hot and desirable
Just think about it, seriously. Imagine yourself as the Übermensch. The person who — can you even believe it — actually flosses every single day. Inconceivable. It boggles the mind, honestly, that someone could be so good at being a human being.
But that’s you, dude! You are — in your imagination for now, and hopefully in real life in the near future — that fucking cool. You’re a member of the esteemed rank of flossers. What a life. What a legend. What an inspiration to us all.
There Will Be Blood
Yes, if you’re not in the habit of flossing, your gums are going to bleed when you start. Sometimes a lot, sometimes less a lot.
It’s really not a big deal, though. It might look scary, but it’s fine. That’s simply what is to be expected.
If you keep regularly flossing, the bleeding will quickly start to subside. Fewer and fewer areas will bleed at all. The areas that do bleed will bleed less and less. More and more frequently, you will have entire flossing sessions with no blood at all. Eventually, blood will be a very rare occurrence.
Also, if you don’t floss, then Daniel Day-Lewis is going to brutally beat you to death.
String vs Picks
Flossing with a piece of string in your hands is annoying, but ultimately gives the best results. Flossing with a pre-prepared pick9 is far more convenient, but ultimately not as good as flossing with good ol’ normal-ass floss.
If you have trouble getting yourself to floss, just use the picks. Going from zero flossing, to any kind of flossing at all, is already a vast improvement. Worry about the specifics of doing it “right” once you’re in the habit of doing it whatsoever.
Proper Technique
Again, don’t worry too much about having proper technique. There is a proper technique, and it does matter, but what matters is that you regularly get in the habit of flossing at all.
If you start out immediately trying to do it the “perfect” way, you are more likely to overstress about it, feel shame, and stop doing it.
If you get in the habit of flossing, you will have ample opportunities — at least once a day — to iteratively work on technique. And until you have perfect technique, you will still be doing a very important thing for your teeth!
Just ask your dentist for tips, honestly.
That’s the post. It’s a weird one, I’ll grant.
But please, just think about flossing. It’s a really good idea, I promise. It’s also entirely possible and feasible.
To the two women in my life who I know do this: you have to stop. Think of avoiding TikTok like flossing for your soul.
If it doesn’t include that, you at least know it should, and feel guilty about it. Also, brush your teeth.
Entrenchment refers to the entirely-human, very normal (this is genuinely not sarcasm) emotional response whereby a sound, valid argument is simply ignored because the person making the argument has presented it in a way that evokes defensiveness, shame, or anger in the recipient. See: every political “conversation” in the past two decades.
We couldn’t find it. This probably had something to do with the massive pool of blood spilling from my screaming, traumatized mouth onto the street.
This is something I am still trying to unlearn to this day. The stains were on the right side of my mouth, so I was paying extra (subconscious) attention to how I moved the right side of my mouth when I smiled. I suspect this caused my smile to become “stronger” on that side, and now I look like a stroke victim when I smile. Oh well.
One of the greatest honors and pleasures I have ever had the immense privilege of being part of. Love you guys. Also, I don’t remember if it was the 2018 event exactly.
To be fair, I was also told that it’s likely because of the alignment of my teeth and the pressure it applies to my gums when I bite. This is the version of events I told people, because I was ashamed of the full truth of the matter.
There are many sources. Google it. But here’s one: https://brooklynblvddental.com/flossing-important-brushing/
Neither righteously indignant nor ashamed and defensive, I am ecstatic and in love. Josh, I never imagined that my idea about flossing would reach a wider audience. What you wrote here is the absolute embodiment of everything I believe and wanted to convey, but what is truly amazing is that we hardly talked about it. It was a brief comment in a bigger conversation of positive change. Even though you could have just ignored it, you chose to think about it yourself, and you came to understand the same philosophy that I did. You took the idea farther than I would have ever thought, without anyone telling you to, and I'm incredibly proud and happy to have been here to have a lasting and positive impact on your life. Thank you, thank you, I love you, thank you.
To anyone else reading this, I want to say that flossing can be just the beginning. I think that it is the bedrock of self-care and positive change. I never used to exercise or take care of myself. It's easy not to, because doing those things is really hard. Flossing, for me, was kind of like a meditation. It taught me how to do things that I don't want to do when I know that they will make me feel better and make me healthier. It was a turning point, where instead of just putting up with life and going through the motions, I decided that I was going to live healthily and happily, even though I didn't know it at the time.
If you're just getting started, I think you should have fun with it. When I envisioned myself as being someone who flosses every day, I didn't imagine some mundane and humble flosser. I imagined an arrogant prick saying something like, "What, you don't floss every day? Hahaha. Ooookay." I wanted to be in that position because I thought it was funny, and it sounded like something I would say as a joke. Anyways, thanks again Josh. This is really amazing.