How To Clean Your Tongue – Steps To Avoid Bad Breath

How To Clean Your Tongue – Steps To Avoid Bad Breath

A lot of people who brush their teeth forget that cleaning their tongue is just as important. The foods, drink and bacteria that can collect on your tongue throughout the night, or throughout the day can lead to bad breath even if you have a stringent cleaning regime of brushing your teeth twice of even three times per day.

Now, one of the reasons that some people prefer not to clean their tongue is because of the gag reflex.  The gag reflex for some of us can be quite sensitive so we are going to look at the best way to clean your tongue below:

Firstly you want to extend your tongue so it comes out of your mouth, when you do this your tongue will stretch and it will tend to harden up which makes brushing it that little bit easier.Some toothbrushes have a raised back to them directly behind the brush head, which you can use to massage across your tongue, to lift and debris. Otherwise, simply use the brush itself to rub on your tongue – stopping when you feel your gag reflex kick-in.

Swill your mouth with water and repeat the process again.

If you have any mouth wash handy, it’s worth gargling some at this point to just get rid of the taste that may be left in your mouth.

Even though you may brush your teeth twice or three times per day, if you leave your tongue out of the cleaning process you will inevitably find that you have bad breath (not in every instance I should point out) – but you may be wondering why your breath smells and this is the likely reason why.

If you are worried about your gag reflex then just keep performing the clean on your tongue and eventually you should find that the sensitivity should settle down.

For more tips, fun facts and information on health and hygiene read some of our other posts.

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