A night guard costs a fraction of a single crown, yet grinding remains the most common reason a mouth full of new ceramic fails within about five years.
The signs are on the teeth before they are in your awareness: flattened canine tips, a white ridge along the inside of the cheeks, scalloped edges on the tongue, and jaw muscles that ache on waking rather than at bedtime. Morning headaches at the temples belong to the same pattern. Sleep grinding is driven centrally during brief arousals, and alcohol, nicotine and some antidepressants all increase it.
Enamel and its shock-absorbing ligament tolerate decades of grinding by wearing down slowly. Ceramic does not wear, it fatigues and then chips, usually at a biting edge. Implants make this worse because they have no ligament: no cushioning, and no early warning pain, so the first sign of overload is a loosened screw or a fractured bridge rather than an ache you could have acted on.
A hard acrylic full-coverage splint spreads the load across every tooth and sacrifices itself instead of your ceramics; it is replaced every one to three years, which is exactly the point. What it does not do is stop your brain from clenching, so it protects rather than cures. Soft rubber guards are comfortable and can make some people chew harder against them, which is worse than nothing.
Twenty zirconium crowns at one hundred and eighty euros each is three thousand six hundred euros of ceramic, and unmanaged bruxism can wreck that in a couple of years. So a guard is planned into the treatment from the start, the bite is recorded and checked before the final crowns are cemented, and if a patient tells us plainly they will never wear a splint, we would rather not begin the smile makeover.
It reduces the force the masseter can generate for three to four months, which helps muscle pain and protects ceramics, but it does not stop the central drive to grind. We use it as an adjunct alongside a splint, never as a replacement for one.
Yes, and please do, but bring it to the first appointment. If your bite changes during treatment the old splint will no longer fit, and a splint that fits badly loads a few teeth instead of all of them.