Part of TMJ disorder
Jaw locking: is your jaw stuck open, or will it not open?
Warning signs, and when to get help
Is your jaw stuck open, or will it not open?
Answer that before you read anything else on this page. Everything below splits at this point, and the two problems have almost nothing in common except the word locking.
One thing comes before the split. If any of this started with a blow to the face, a fall, a sports injury or any other accident, it goes to an emergency department whichever way the jaw is stuck, and whether or not the teeth still meet.
A broken jaw can look like either kind of locking, and MedlinePlus lists jaw stiffness, trouble opening the mouth widely, trouble closing it, a jaw that moves to one side on opening and numbness of the lower lip among the signs of a broken jaw. In the warning list further down this page, the emergency line about an injury carries the full instruction. It reads the same way for a child or a teenager, and if anything more strongly: in children the jaw is the most commonly broken bone in the face, most often at the condyle, which is the part that forms the joint (Hajibandeh and Peacock, 2023).
What does not count as an injury: a yawn, a laugh or a big bite. If nothing struck your jaw and you did not fall, the split below is the one that applies to you, and the paragraph above is not about you. A jaw that will not open after dental treatment is its own case: call the dental practice the same day and tell them, because they know what was done and for how long. A jaw stuck open during or after dental treatment is a dislocation like any other, and goes where the rest of this page sends one. If you cannot decide whether what happened counts, treat it as an injury and have it looked at today rather than talking yourself out of it.
Stuck open means your teeth will not come together. The mouth is held wide, you cannot bite, speech is awkward and you may be drooling because you cannot close your lips. MedlinePlus lists exactly that: an inability to close the mouth, drooling because of it, and a locked jaw or a jaw that protrudes forward. The review of jaw dislocation describes the clinical picture as a jaw fixed in the open position, with an inability to close the jaws and pain as the cardinal symptoms (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). This is a dislocation. It goes to hospital.
Will not open means the opposite. Your teeth meet normally, but the mouth opens only a fraction of its usual range, as though something is blocking it partway. Very often there is a history of clicking on that side that has recently stopped, which is the detail that gives it away. This is what clinicians call a closed lock. It is uncomfortable, it tends to improve, and it is not an emergency, with two exceptions that go to an emergency department instead. One is a jaw that locked after an injury to the face or jaw. The other is a jaw held shut by an infection, which comes with a swollen face or gum, a high temperature, or trouble swallowing or breathing.
Catches and then frees is the third and by far the commonest. The jaw snags for a second on the way open, you jiggle or shift it, and it goes. That is intermittent locking, and it is a reason for an assessment rather than a trip to anywhere today.
Jaw locked open: what to do
Go to an emergency department now, which is the department called A and E in the UK and Ireland and the ER in the United States and Canada. Support the jaw gently with your hand on the way, as MedlinePlus advises, and ask someone else to drive. Call emergency services instead if you are finding it hard to breathe or are bleeding heavily. In the warning list at the foot of this page, the emergency line about a mouth stuck open carries the full instruction.
Two practical things while you are on the way. Do not eat or drink anything unless the hospital tells you otherwise: a jaw that does not go back with hands alone is put back under medicine, sedation or a general anesthetic (Prechel and colleagues, 2018), and you will be asked when you last ate. And take a list of your medicines with you, because that question comes early and is hard to answer with a jaw you cannot close.
Do not try to put it back. That is not caution on our part, it is what the source says: MedlinePlus states do not try to correct the position of the jaw, and that a provider should do this.
More reasons not to wait it out, all from the dislocation review. The earlier the reduction is performed the greater the chance of success, and delay makes the reduction harder and raises the risk of it happening again. If a dislocation has gone on for 3 to 4 weeks, manual reduction is usually no longer successful and surgery is considered. And the cost of waiting is not only a harder reduction: the review opens by saying that diagnosis and treatment without delay are what avoids permanent damage to the joint, describes a jaw left dislocated as blocked out of its socket with irreversible changes in and around the capsule, and recommends starting treatment as early as possible to limit those degenerative changes (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). The window closes, and the joint is what pays for it.
What happens when you get there, so it is less of a shock: the diagnosis is usually made by looking and feeling rather than by scanning, and the first treatment is manual reduction, which the review states should be the initial treatment for every patient with a non-traumatic dislocation. Read both halves of that. The examination-only route is for a first dislocation without facial injury, and the same review says imaging should be used where the symptoms leave room for another diagnosis, to rule out facial fractures and to plan treatment. So a jaw that dislocated during a yawn is usually a hands-on diagnosis, and a jaw that went after an impact is a jaw that gets pictures taken. If the reduction does not work straight away it can be repeated with muscle relaxants or painkillers, and under sedation or general anesthesia if needed. The paper is also candid that the evidence base is thin, with few randomized trials behind any of it.
Three things to know afterwards. About 20 percent of people have it happen again after a first dislocation, and the review advises that anyone with a history of dislocation should be asked about it before a procedure under general anesthesia, because intubation is one of the situations it happens in (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). Tell the team handling your anesthetic, and your dentist, yourself. It is one sentence that can save you a repeat. If it does go again, the route is the one you took the first time: an emergency department, a hand under the jaw, somebody else driving, and no attempt to put it back yourself unless your own maxillofacial team has taught you how for your own jaw. Having been through it once is not training, and the tenth time is treated like the first.
The third thing is how long the joint needs your mouth kept small afterwards, which is the part people are rarely told clearly. MedlinePlus is specific: after dislocating your jaw, do not open your mouth widely for at least 6 weeks, and support your jaw with one or both hands when you yawn or sneeze. It adds that the jaw is sometimes bandaged after a reduction to stop it opening wide, and that surgery is occasionally used to achieve that in people who dislocate repeatedly. The reason for the wait is the capsule and the ligaments that let go in the first place, and they do not recover in the few days it takes the pain to settle. Whatever your own team tells you comes first, because they know how your jaw went back and what they found. Ask them before you eat anything that needs a wide bite, before a long dental appointment, and before any jaw exercise, here or anywhere else.
Nobody puts a number on widely, and we are not going to invent one. In practice it means staying well inside your range instead of going looking for the end of it. No big yawns, and a hand under the chin as one starts rather than after it. Nothing you have to bite into, so food is cut small enough to go in without stretching. No gum. No wide singing, shouting or wind instruments, and no holding the mouth open for a dental appointment that can wait. Talking, drinking, soft food and gentle closing carry on as normal, and so does the relaxation and teeth-apart work further down this page, which asks nothing of the joint.
The 6 weeks is a floor rather than a finish line, and nothing changes by itself on the day it ends. There is no test to do at 6 weeks to see whether it has healed, and opening wide to find out is the one thing the 6 weeks was for. Ask the team who put it back whether you can widen, say if this was not your first dislocation, and then widen in small steps over weeks rather than going back to a full yawn in one go.
A jaw that will not open fully (closed lock): what to do
Everything in this section assumes nothing hit you. A jaw that will not open after a blow, a fall or a sports injury goes to an emergency department instead, even with the teeth meeting normally and the face looking unremarkable.
It also assumes you are not fighting an infection. A jaw that will not open along with a swollen face or gum, a high temperature, or trouble swallowing or breathing goes to an emergency department as well: for a dental abscess the NHS puts being unable to open your mouth at the emergency level, alongside difficulty breathing, speaking or swallowing, a lot of swelling in the mouth, and a swollen or painful eye. Its toothache page puts a swollen neck, or swelling around the eye, at that level too.
Stop using it hard, and get medical or dental advice the same day if it stays stuck, or if the pain or stiffness is stopping you eating or drinking. The NHS puts difficulty opening your mouth fully or a jaw that is locking on its list of reasons to ask for an urgent appointment or help from NHS 111.
While you are waiting, treat it like the most irritable version of a flare. Soft food and liquids you can manage without opening wide, teeth apart whenever you are not eating, and nothing that asks the joint to go to its limit. No testing how far it opens today. No stretching it open. No chewing gum to loosen it off. Do not bite into anything with your front teeth either, which is on the NHS list of things to avoid with a jaw problem and is the habit that quietly asks for the most opening. That same NHS list includes paracetamol or ibuprofen for the pain. A pharmacist can tell you which one suits you alongside anything else you take, and neither of them unlocks a jaw, so taking one is not a reason to start using it normally.
The reassuring part of this is well studied. In a trial of 69 people whose locked joint had been confirmed on MRI, three groups were followed over 8 weeks: a control group, a self-care program with an anti-inflammatory, and a splint and jaw mobilization added to that same self-care and anti-inflammatory. Every group improved on every measure, no group did better than the control, and the authors concluded that people with this condition improve with only minimal treatment (Minakuchi and colleagues, 2001).
A larger study went further and compared surgery with the conservative routes. It assigned 106 people with a locked joint at random to medical management, rehabilitation, arthroscopic surgery with rehabilitation afterwards, or open surgery with rehabilitation afterwards, and followed them for up to 60 months. There was no difference between the four at any point, and every group improved. The authors concluded that medical management or rehabilitation should be the primary treatment, which avoids unnecessary surgery (Schiffman and colleagues, 2007).
So the headline for a closed lock is that it usually settles with the sensible, boring things, and that surgery was no better in the one study that tested the question properly. Getting it looked at still matters, because a jaw that will not open has other causes, including infection, and that is what the warning list exists for.
Why does my jaw lock?
Because the disc that sits between the jaw and the skull has stopped sliding with the jaw the way it should. That is the usual explanation for both the catching kind and the closed kind, and it is why the two often turn up in the same person months apart.
The diagnostic criteria used in research and specialist clinics draw the line by what the person reports. A jaw that locks with limited opening and then frees itself is classified as intermittent locking. A jaw that locked so it would not open all the way, and interfered with eating, is the closed lock pattern (Schiffman and colleagues, 2014). The examination then adds measured mouth opening, with and without gentle help from the examiner, along with how the jaw deviates as it opens. The criteria put millimeter cut-offs on those measurements, and we have deliberately left the numbers off this page. One of them is taken while an examiner gently assists the opening, one of them counts in how far your upper teeth overlap your lower ones, and a jaw that locks is not a jaw to go prising open with your fingers to see which side of a number you land on. The measuring belongs to the appointment.
The validity figures in that paper decide how much an examination can tell you. For the closed lock pattern, the clinical criteria had a sensitivity of 0.80 and a specificity of 0.97, which the authors note makes it the one joint diagnosis in the set with good validity without imaging. For intermittent locking the sensitivity was only 0.38, so a clinical examination misses a good share of them, which is why nobody should read too much into a normal examination on a day your jaw behaves itself.
A locked jaw also has causes that have nothing to do with the disc, and they matter more than the common ones because they are time-critical. Infection is the main one: the NHS lists difficulty opening your mouth and chewing among the symptoms of a dental abscess, and puts being unable to open your mouth, along with difficulty breathing, speaking or swallowing, a lot of swelling in the mouth, or a swollen or painful eye, at the emergency level. Injury is the other: a broken jaw can show up as stiffness, difficulty opening the mouth widely or a numb lower lip rather than as an obviously crooked face, which is why the emergency warning line about an injury sends a jaw that locked after a blow or a fall to an emergency department even when the teeth still meet.
The dislocation review makes the same point from the other side. The groups it names as the ones in whom the signs of a dislocated jaw are less noticeable, so that the diagnosis is missed at first, are people after trauma, people under sedation, people with dementia and people whose jaw has been out for a while, and it adds older people with several health conditions, in whom the signs are milder and the dislocation is often overlooked because the ability to communicate is often limited (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). That matters if you are reading this for somebody else. A person who cannot tell you their jaw will not close may show it only by drooling, by stopping eating, by speech that has changed, or by a bite that suddenly looks wrong, and any of those is an emergency department today rather than a dentist next week. After an accident, the jaw gets looked at rather than reasoned about.
Children belong here too, and not as an afterthought. The jaw is the most commonly broken bone in a child's face, most often at the condyle, the part that forms the joint, and most of those breaks are treated without an operation (Hajibandeh and Peacock, 2023). So a child whose jaw locks, will not meet properly or hurts in front of the ear after a knock is a trip to an emergency department, and a child whose jaw locks with no injury at all is still an appointment rather than something to manage at home. Nothing on this page is a reason to work on a child's jaw yourself.
One more mechanical cause belongs here, because people look for it with the same words: a jaw that will not open because it has been wired or banded shut after a break. That is your surgical team's work rather than a locking problem, and MedlinePlus carries three instructions worth having if that is you. Wires are usually left on for 6 to 8 weeks. While they are on you can only drink liquids or eat very soft food. And the blunt scissors you were sent home with are for cutting the elastics if you are choking or being sick, after which you contact your provider straight away so they can be replaced. Nothing else is cut for any other reason, and no exercise on this site is for a jaw that is wired or banded shut: after jaw surgery or a broken jaw, check with your surgeon before you start anything, and follow their plan.
Why does my jaw lock when I yawn?
A yawn is the widest your mouth goes in a normal day, and it happens before you have decided anything. The dislocation review names yawning, laughing and biting as the most common triggers for a jaw dislocating, and lists intubation, endoscopy and prolonged dental treatments such as tooth extractions among the less common ones (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). The pattern is the same in each: the mouth is taken wider than usual, often for longer than usual.
The NHS puts do not yawn too wide on its short list of things to avoid with a jaw problem, which is easy to agree with and hard to do. What makes it possible in practice is a hand: cup it under your chin as the yawn starts and let the jaw open into your palm. People who have had a jaw stuck open once rarely need telling twice.
If your jaw locks at the dentist rather than at home, say so before the next appointment rather than during it. Ask whether a long session can be split, and whether you can have breaks to close and rest the jaw.
Jaw locking and clicking when eating or chewing
Clicking on its own is not the problem people assume it is. The NIDCR is explicit that clicking or popping in the jaw joint without pain is common, considered normal, and does not need treatment. That is worth knowing before anyone sells you a treatment for a noise.
The sequence to pay attention to is a click that disappears. A joint that has clicked on opening for years, then stops clicking and starts refusing to open fully, has usually moved from the catching pattern to the closed one. That is the history a dentist or physio is listening for, so bring it with you: when the clicking started, when it stopped, and when the opening changed.
Meals are where this gets practical. Cut everything small, stay off the chewy and crusty foods, and share the work between both sides rather than giving the whole job to the side that feels safe. Weeks of chewing on one side is a habit we spend a lot of time undoing.
Jaw locking on one side
Most of this happens on one side, so a one-sided lock is not a sign that something unusual is going on. The joint has a left and a right and they are separate joints, both used in every bite.
What to notice is which side the jaw drifts toward as it opens, because a jaw that cannot slide properly on one side tends to swing toward that side on the way open. The formal criteria include that deviation, along with how far the jaw moves to the opposite side (Schiffman and colleagues, 2014). You do not need to measure anything. A mirror and the observation that it veers left or right is plenty to describe at an appointment.
Two one-sided patterns are not jaw joint patterns at all. New pain on one side of the face, jaw or neck with a drooping eyelid or a smaller pupil on that side, or with a new pulsing sound in one ear, has its own emergency line on this page. And one-sided swelling with a high temperature is the infection route. Both are on the warning list.
Why forcing it is not the answer
The reasons differ for each kind of lock.
With a jaw stuck open, your own force is working against the thing holding it there, and MedlinePlus says plainly that the repositioning is a clinician's job. Pulling at it hurts, usually achieves nothing, and takes up part of the window in which a reduction works best (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). There is a worse version of it after an injury, which is that a jaw hit hard enough to lock may also be broken, and the review puts manual reduction first only for dislocations that did not come from trauma, with imaging to rule out a facial fracture where another diagnosis is possible. Hands on a jaw that nobody has x-rayed yet is not a risk to take at home.
With a closed lock, the block is inside the joint, so stretching harder loads a structure that is already jammed. Nothing in the studies above suggests that getting the mouth open faster leads to a better result. People improved while doing less.
With an intermittent catch, repeated forcing turns an occasional nuisance into an irritable joint, which is the version we see most in clinic. The jaw was managing until somebody decided to work on it hourly.
A word about what you will find when you search this. Much of it will show you a hands-on technique with a disclaimer printed underneath. Some clinicians do teach a specific self-management technique to people with recurrent locking, and that happens in person, after an examination, to someone whose joint has been assessed. The same is occasionally true for dislocation: a few people whose jaw goes out again and again are shown by their own maxillofacial team how to handle a recurrence, and the surgical literature carries the odd case description of a one-handed method meant for exactly that. None of it transfers. It is taught to one named person about one assessed joint, and never for a first dislocation, never for a jaw that locked after an injury, and never off a page. If nobody has taught you, the instruction is the one MedlinePlus gives, which is not to try to correct the position of the jaw, because a provider should do it. A video cannot assess a joint, and nor can a set of instructions read off a screen.
What treatment is there for a jaw that keeps locking?
Conservative care first, and that is not a consolation prize here, it is what the trials support. The two studies above both found the straightforward routes doing as well as anything else, including surgery (Minakuchi and colleagues, 2001; Schiffman and colleagues, 2007).
For jaw pain that has lasted 3 months or more, the 2023 BMJ clinical practice guideline strongly recommends supervised jaw exercise and stretching, therapist-assisted mobilization, manual trigger point therapy, supervised posture exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy, and usual care, and strongly recommends against discectomy and against irreversible oral splints (Busse and colleagues, 2023). Two cautions come with that guideline. It is written for persistent pain rather than for locking as such, and it says its recommendations do not apply to acute pain.
The NIDCR advice sits alongside it: stay with conservative treatments and avoid anything that permanently changes the jaw joints, the teeth or the bite, with surgery considered only in specific cases after simpler options have failed. If an irreversible procedure is being proposed for a jaw that locks intermittently, that is a second opinion rather than a decision for the same week.
For repeated dislocations, the options sit with a maxillofacial team. The review describes botulinum toxin, autologous blood and prolotherapy as minimally invasive options used mainly where surgery carries extra risk, and open surgery where conservative and minimally invasive methods have failed, with eminectomy the best documented operation (Prechel and colleagues, 2018).
A jaw that keeps going out is usually not carelessness, and the same review lists what makes it more likely: neurological and neuromuscular conditions, Parkinson's disease and oromandibular dystonia among them, losing the back teeth so the bite has nothing to stop against, and inborn joint laxity such as Marfan syndrome. Those are also why a second group of dislocations appears in later life (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). If one of them is yours, it is worth saying so when you are seen, because it changes what prevention looks like, and it is not a list anybody can treat at home.
What a physio or physical therapist does about intermittent locking
Measures it, first. How far the jaw opens, where it deviates, which side clicks, whether the catch is reproducible, and what the neck and the chewing muscles are doing. That examination is also the point at which the things that are not a jaw problem get sorted out, which is the main argument for being seen once rather than managing a locking jaw indefinitely on your own.
After that, the work is usually unglamorous: controlled opening in a range that does not provoke the catch, letting go of the daytime clenching that keeps the chewing muscles loaded, hands-on treatment of the chewing and neck muscles, and the ordinary load advice about food, gum and yawning. The TMJ disorder program is that plan written out, with the doses on each exercise page and the staging on the parent page. One rule comes before any of it, so take it with you if you follow that link: if your jaw has ever been stuck open, no jaw opening work starts until your dentist or physio has checked the joint, and if the dislocation was in the last 6 weeks, nothing starts at all until the team who treated you says so.
One caution applies to every exercise on this site if your jaw locks: a jaw that clicks painfully, catches or has ever locked is checked in person before you start the jaw exercises, and a jaw that has ever been stuck open is checked with your dentist or physio before any jaw opening work. If the dislocation was in the last 6 weeks, the answer is to wait rather than to start, because MedlinePlus says not to open the mouth widely for at least that long after a jaw dislocates, and your own team decides when that changes. After jaw surgery or a broken jaw, check with your surgeon before you start, and follow their plan.
That gate covers the two the program uses, jaw opening with the tongue on the roof of the mouth in stage 2 and the temporalis stretch in stage 3. It covers three more in our library that are not part of this program and are not linked from here on purpose: the jaw stretch, resisted jaw opening and jaw protraction. If you meet them elsewhere on this site, the same gate applies. Jaw protraction is the one to be most careful with, because sliding the jaw forward moves the joint in the same direction it travels when a jaw locks open.
What you can get on with while you wait is the part that asks nothing of the joint. Facial muscle relaxation and the breathing and body scan work in stage 1 of the program are the pieces that do not need the jaw to open at all. Facial muscle relaxation needs one change made before you start, and it is the same change the program asks for: with a jaw problem, do it with your teeth slightly apart and squeeze only around your eyes and cheeks, not your jaw. The steps on that page describe the whole face scrunched up with the jaw closed firmly, which is the version for somebody whose jaw is fine, and clenching is the last thing a locking jaw needs.
Each of those pages carries its own cautions: ask your physio or doctor how breathing exercises fit your plan if you have a heart or lung condition, ask your doctor or therapist whether the body scan suits you if you are being treated for trauma or a mental health condition, and ask your eye team before squeezing your eyes shut if you have had eye surgery.
When to get help the same day, and when it is an emergency
Emergency, today, by ambulance or emergency department: a jaw stuck open that you cannot close. A jaw that locked, will not open, or will not meet properly, after a blow, a fall or any other accident, even if the teeth still meet as they did, and the same for a numb lower lip, a loose or broken tooth or a changed shape to the cheek or jaw after one. A swollen face or jaw with difficulty breathing, speaking, swallowing or opening your mouth, which the NHS treats as an emergency with a dental abscess, and the same for a swollen neck or swelling around an eye with a tooth you think is infected. Jaw pain alongside chest pain, breathlessness, sweating or feeling sick, or jaw pain brought on by effort and eased by rest, both of which are cardiac patterns rather than jaw patterns. Sudden numbness or weakness on one side of the face, a face that droops, speech that slurs, trouble swallowing or any other sign of a stroke, even if it goes away.
Same day, by doctor or dentist: a jaw that has suddenly locked so it will not open fully, pain or stiffness that is stopping you eating or drinking, a swollen face or gum with a high temperature, or numbness anywhere in the face, lips, tongue or chin that has come on gradually, with no injury and none of the emergency signs above.
Everything else on this subject is an assessment rather than an emergency, and the sooner it happens the less guesswork there is. Red flags in physiotherapy explains why we treat that list as its own set of questions.
Related exercise programs
Warning signs
Get emergency help now
- Emergency: your mouth is stuck open and you cannot close it, for example after a big yawn, or after a blow to your face your jaw looks out of place, your teeth no longer meet as they did or you cannot bite together. Go to an emergency department straight away, supporting your jaw gently with your hand, and do not drive yourself. Call emergency services if you also find it hard to breathe or are bleeding heavily.
- Emergency: your jaw locked, you cannot open or close your mouth properly, part of your lower lip, chin or jaw feels numb, a tooth is loose or broken or your gum or mouth is bleeding, your jaw swings to one side as it opens, or your cheek or jaw has a lump or a changed shape, after a blow to the face, a fall, a sports injury or any other accident, even if your teeth still meet as they did. Go to an emergency department straight away, supporting your jaw gently with your hand, and do not drive yourself. Call emergency services if you also find it hard to breathe, are bleeding heavily or your face is swelling quickly. A jaw can be broken without looking out of place, and jaw stiffness, trouble opening your mouth widely, pain in front of your ear that is worse when you bite or chew, or a numb lower lip can be the main sign.
- Emergency: you think you have a tooth infection, or your face or jaw is swollen, and you find it hard to breathe, speak, swallow or open your mouth, have a lot of swelling in your mouth, have swelling of your neck or around your eye, or have a swollen or painful eye or sudden problems with your eyesight. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. This can be a spreading infection, for example from a tooth abscess.
- Emergency: neck, jaw or arm pain that comes with chest pain, shortness of breath, sweating or feeling sick. Call emergency services.
- Emergency: jaw, neck, shoulder or arm pain that comes on when you exert yourself, feel stressed or go out in the cold, and does not ease within a few minutes of rest, or comes with sweating, feeling sick, feeling light-headed or being short of breath. Call emergency services straight away, as this can be a heart attack. If it eases quickly with rest and none of these happen, get medical advice the same day, and do not exercise again until you have been checked. Jaw pain that comes with effort and goes with rest can be a sign of angina, a heart problem, rather than TMD.
- Emergency: any sign of a stroke, even if it goes away. That means a face that droops on one side, an arm you cannot lift or keep up, slurred or muddled speech, weakness or numbness on one side of your body or face, sudden blurred vision, double vision or loss of sight, trouble swallowing, sudden dizziness with unsteadiness or falling over, a sudden severe headache, or a sudden fall where your legs give way but you do not black out (a drop attack). Call emergency services straight away. With neck pain, these can rarely come from a tear in an artery in the neck.
- Emergency: a new headache, or new pain on one side of your face, jaw or neck, with a drooping eyelid or a smaller pupil on the same side, or with a new pulsing or whooshing sound in one ear that keeps time with your heartbeat. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. This can be a tear in an artery in the neck (cervical artery dissection), which can lead to a stroke.
- Emergency: a headache or face pain with sudden, intense eye pain, a red eye, blurred vision or rainbow-colored rings around lights, often with feeling or being sick. Call emergency services or go to an emergency department straight away, and do not drive yourself. This can be a sudden rise in pressure inside the eye (acute glaucoma).
Get help today
- New, frequent headaches with pain or tenderness at your temples or on your scalp, or, if you are 50 or over, new jaw pain or aching that comes on as you chew or talk and eases when you stop, or a temple or scalp that has become tender to touch, for example when you brush your hair or rest your head on a pillow. Get medical advice the same day. These can be signs of inflamed arteries in the head (temporal arteritis, also called giant cell arteritis). If your vision changes, call emergency services.
- Your jaw suddenly locks so you cannot open your mouth fully, or the pain or stiffness stops you eating or drinking, without any of the emergency signs above. Get medical advice the same day from your doctor or dentist.
- Frequent, severe headaches alongside your jaw problem, without any of the emergency signs above. Get medical advice the same day.
- Jaw or face pain with a high temperature, a swollen face or gum, or you feel hot, cold, shivery or generally unwell, without any of the emergency signs above. Get medical advice the same day. If you think a tooth is the cause, contact a dentist for an urgent appointment.
- Numbness, tingling or a dead feeling in part of your face, lips, tongue or chin, or weakness in the muscles of your face, that has come on gradually, without any of the emergency signs above. Get medical advice the same day. Changes like these point to a nerve problem rather than TMD and need checking.
- New jaw or face pain and you have had cancer, now or in the past, or you have lost weight without trying. Get medical advice the same day and mention it. If you are being treated for cancer now, contact your cancer team the same day.
- Jaw or face pain that is there all the time and does not ease with rest, or pain at night that keeps getting worse. If you have had cancer, now or in the past, or you have lost weight without trying, get medical advice the same day.
Book an appointment
- Jaw or face pain that is there all the time and does not ease with rest, or pain at night that keeps getting worse. See your doctor within a few days.
- A mouth ulcer that has lasted more than 3 weeks, a lump in your mouth, on your lip, in your neck or in your throat, a red or white patch in your mouth, pain in your mouth that is not going away, difficulty swallowing or speaking, or a hoarse voice that does not go away. See your doctor or dentist within a few days. These are usually caused by something else, but they need checking for mouth cancer.
Common questions
What do you do if your jaw locks?
Start with one question, because it overrides everything else: did this start with a blow to the face, a fall, a sports injury or any other accident? If it did, go to an emergency department whichever way the jaw is stuck and whether or not the teeth still meet, because a broken jaw can present as either. If nothing hit your jaw, work out which way it is stuck, because that decides where you go. Stuck open, with your teeth unable to meet, is a dislocated jaw and goes to an emergency department now, with your hand supporting the jaw and somebody else driving. Stuck shut, so the mouth will not open anything like its usual amount, is a closed lock: stop using it, keep to soft food and liquids you can manage, and get medical or dental advice the same day, especially if it is stopping you eating or drinking. A jaw that will not open along with a swollen face or gum, a high temperature, or trouble swallowing or breathing is the exception to that, and goes to an emergency department instead, because an infection can hold a jaw shut. In every case, do not force it. MedlinePlus states that you should not try to correct the position of the jaw yourself and that a provider should do it.
What does jaw locking mean?
It usually means the disc inside the jaw joint and the jaw itself have stopped moving together smoothly, although locking is a description rather than a diagnosis. The diagnostic criteria used in research and in specialist clinics separate two patterns by the reader's own history. One is a jaw that locks with limited opening and then frees itself, which they classify as intermittent locking. The other is a lock that stops the jaw opening all the way and gets in the way of eating, which is the closed lock pattern (Schiffman and colleagues, 2014). A jaw stuck open is not on that spectrum at all: that one is a dislocation.
Can a locked jaw fix itself?
The closed kind often does improve, which is one of the more useful findings in this field, as long as it locked on its own. A jaw that locked after an injury is a different question, and it is not one to wait out: that one goes to an emergency department to be examined, and usually imaged, because a break can hold a jaw shut as well. In a trial of 69 people with a locked jaw confirmed on MRI, everybody got better over 8 weeks whether they were in the control group, the self-care and anti-inflammatory group, or the group that added a splint and jaw mobilization, and the authors concluded that people with this condition improve with only minimal treatment (Minakuchi and colleagues, 2001). A jaw stuck open is the opposite case. It does not resolve itself, the chance of a successful reduction falls the longer it is left, and leaving it risks permanent damage to the joint, which is the reason the review gives for treating it without delay (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). It needs an emergency department straight away rather than tomorrow.
Why does my jaw lock when I yawn?
Because a yawn is the widest your mouth goes all day, usually without you deciding to. A review of temporomandibular joint dislocation names yawning, laughing and biting as the most common triggers, which is why a dislocation often starts in the middle of something completely ordinary (Prechel and colleagues, 2018). The NHS puts do not yawn too wide on its list of things to avoid with jaw problems. In practice the way to keep a yawn small is to put a hand under your chin as it starts, because you cannot talk yourself out of a yawn once it is coming.
Why does my jaw lock in the morning?
A jaw that is stiff and sore on waking usually points at the hours you were not awake for. Overnight clenching and grinding loads the joint and the chewing muscles for a long stretch with nothing to stop you, and the NHS names stress and anxiety as the most common cause of teeth grinding. A morning catch that frees after a few careful movements is common with jaw problems. A morning lock that does not free is a different thing: get medical or dental advice the same day, and do not start forcing it open to get through breakfast. Two versions of it go to an emergency department instead, whatever time of day it is: a jaw that locked after a knock to the face or a fall, and a locked jaw you wake up with alongside a swollen face or gum, a high temperature, or trouble swallowing or breathing.
References
- MedlinePlus. Broken or dislocated jaw. US National Library of Medicine. Review date 3 April 2025. https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000019.htm
- Prechel U, Ottl P, Ahlers OM, Neff A. The treatment of temporomandibular joint dislocation. Deutsches Arzteblatt International. 2018;115(5):59-64. https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.2018.0059
- Hajibandeh J, Peacock ZS. Pediatric mandible fractures. Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Clinics of North America. 2023;35(4):555-562. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coms.2023.05.001
- Schiffman E, Ohrbach R, Truelove E, Look J, Anderson G, Goulet JP, et al. Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders (DC/TMD) for clinical and research applications. Journal of Oral and Facial Pain and Headache. 2014;28(1):6-27. https://doi.org/10.11607/jop.1151
- Minakuchi H, Kuboki T, Matsuka Y, Maekawa K, Yatani H, Yamashita A. Randomized controlled evaluation of non-surgical treatments for temporomandibular joint anterior disk displacement without reduction. Journal of Dental Research. 2001;80(3):924-928. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220345010800031501
- Schiffman EL, Look JO, Hodges JS, Swift JQ, Decker KL, Hathaway KM, et al. Randomized effectiveness study of four therapeutic strategies for TMJ closed lock. Journal of Dental Research. 2007;86(1):58-63. https://doi.org/10.1177/154405910708600109
- Busse JW, Casassus R, Carrasco-Labra A, Durham J, Mock D, Zakrzewska JM, et al. Management of chronic pain associated with temporomandibular disorders: a clinical practice guideline. BMJ. 2023;383:e076227. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2023-076227
- NHS. Temporomandibular disorder (TMD). Page last reviewed 20 June 2023. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/temporomandibular-disorder-tmd/
- National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR). Temporomandibular disorders (TMD). https://www.nidcr.nih.gov/health-info/tmd
- NHS. Dental abscess. Page last reviewed 18 March 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/dental-abscess/
- NHS. Teeth grinding (bruxism). Page last reviewed 8 April 2026. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/teeth-grinding/
- NHS. Angina. Page last reviewed 18 March 2025. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/angina/
- NHS. Temporal arteritis. Page last reviewed 14 August 2023. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/temporal-arteritis/
- NHS. Glaucoma. Page last reviewed 13 June 2025. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/glaucoma/
- NHS. Mouth cancer: symptoms. Page last reviewed 19 June 2023. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/mouth-cancer/symptoms/
Written and checked by the PocketPhysio editorial team. Last updated 2026-10-23.
This page is general education, not a diagnosis or a personal treatment plan. See a physiotherapist or doctor for advice about your own situation.