TENTATIVE potential bruxism/teeth grinding prevention idea

tl;dr

Sleep with your head at an angle of ~95° - 110° angle, as long as it's comfortable.

zzzzz liek dis ^.  Adapted from here

Introduction

I, like many of you (8% to 31.4%) experience bruxism or teeth grinding during sleep. It's that feeling when you wake up and your jaw muscles are sore already, and your teeth feel like they've had a rough night.

The dentist will give you a dental guard, and this will generally reduce wear and tear on teeth, but it won't prevent bruxism itself. I am going to get one in a few months myself for my check up.

I was thinking about sleep, how I sleep and why my bruxism is occurring. I am not stressed, don't have sleep apnoea, have no physical or oral ticks and I get regular, high quality sleep. Despite this, teeth grinding occurs for me on a nightly basis, and it is starting to tornado into a positive feedback cycle, because now I am a little stressed my bruxism is going to destroy my teeth, so it may have led to an increase in grinding, and so on and so forth.

So the question becomes, how to reduce the chance of teeth grinding? 

The idea

I have come up with a tentative idea which I've been trying out, with fairly decent success. I am in the middle of graphing it over a year, so I'll post that when I'm done, to see if there has been any statistical improvement.

It involves the angle of the head during sleeping. I usually sleep with my head tucked down, which looks something like this, with some meat and skin stretched over it:

A quick image edit using GIMP2, showing how tucking your head will compress your mandible (jaw) into your maxilla, forcing your teeth together in close proximity. This is a quickly edited image and in reality the spine would bend more, resulting in a realistic tucked head. Adapted from here.

Tilting your head down to sleep, while allowing you to drift off peacefully, creating a safe, somnolence-inducing sleeping position, nested upon your own bosom brings your mandible (jaw) which houses your bottom row of teeth, into contact with your upper teeth, attached to the maxilla (face bone where in which your upper teeth are embedded).

Now the opposite should be true. Try tilting your head up at 95° - 110°. The only way to grind your upper and lower teeth is by engaging 4 major masticating (chewing) muscles attached to these bones: the masseter, temporalis medial pterygoid and ateral pterygoid. Not only do you have to engage them, but they will need to contract across their full dynamic range for your teeth to come together. This is probably a bigger ask compared to keeping your head tucked in/lower than 90°.

The pillow

Something which may be contributing to the bruxism-inducing angle (<90 font="">°) or BIA which I am now coining, is your pillow. If your shoulders aren't also on your pillow, it will put your neck at the BIA, which you should try to avoid if you want to PROBABLY reduce bruxism.
Now I don't know enough about proper sleeping positions to recommend anything, but I've also been sleeping up higher on my pillow and it may be helping me.

Considering there is no true 'treatment', just ways to deal with the symptoms, I can't see how this will hurt.

The drawbacks

Firstly, any sleepytime adjustments will render this moot. I don't recommend tying/fixing anything to your neck or head for sleep either, as this can be dangerous and lead to asphyxiation. 

Secondly, this may not even work. It hasn't been proven yet, and I could still be under the placebo effect. I would like to see it tested on a large number of people to see its impact. Even being mindful of the angle of head during sleep may help. Who knows?


Maybe something to keep in mind.