Why Your Jaw and Pelvic Floor Are More Connected Than You'd Think

If you clench your jaw, you're not alone, and you're probably not even aware you're doing it most of the time.

Maybe it shows up as headaches. Maybe your dentist has mentioned wear on your teeth, or you wake up with a tight, aching jaw you can't quite explain, or a feeling like you have barely slept, despite having a full night’s sleep.

Or maybe it was the mention of the pelvic floor that brought you here. Perhaps there’s a niggling fear of being incontinent as you get older; a quiet worry that slower mobility down the line will only make things harder to manage. Maybe it's the quiet embarrassment of limitations you've stopped mentioning to anyone, the things you've stopped doing without really announcing it to yourself. Maybe it's simply wanting to feel proactive now, rather than waiting until something goes wrong.

These can feel like completely separate problems. A tense jaw over here. A pelvic floor that isn't quite doing what you need it to over there. But the body doesn't really work in separate parts, and once you understand how these two areas are connected, a lot of things start to make more sense.

The jaw is the gripping centre

The muscles you clench and grind with, the ones at your temples and along your jawline, are some of the strongest in your whole body. They're also closely tied to your stress response. When the jaw is in a near constant state of gripping, a few things tend to happen alongside it. Breathing becomes more restricted. The muscles in the neck tighten. The nervous system stays a little more alert than it needs to be.

And tension in the pelvic floor often increases too.

This isn't a coincidence or a stretch. It's how the body is built.

How tension actually travels

The face, jaw, neck, ribcage and pelvic floor are all linked through fascia (the connective tissue that wraps around and through your muscles), through the mechanics of breathing, through posture, and through the nervous system.

Here's roughly how the chain works.

When the jaw is gripping, the muscles of the neck and throat often tighten in response. This is the part of the body that bridges jaw tension and breathing mechanics. A tighter neck and throat can restrict how well the ribcage and diaphragm move, which matters because every breath you take changes the pressure through your abdomen and pelvis.

When breathing becomes shallow or chest dominant rather than full and diaphragmatic, the pelvic floor often loses some of its natural responsiveness. Instead of working the way it's designed to, lengthening and contracting smoothly in response to movement and pressure, it can end up doing the opposite of what you'd expect. It might become overly tight, or it might become fatigued and underactive, sometimes both at once.

This is why a tense, overworked jaw can sit alongside symptoms like pelvic pain, leaking, heaviness, or a feeling that something simply isn't quite right down there, even in women who have never connected the two.

Why this matters more than it might seem

A lot of women come to pelvic floor work having already tried the obvious things. Kegels. Squeezing. Being told to "just strengthen." And when that doesn't fully work, it's easy to feel like you're somehow doing it wrong, or that your body just isn't responding the way it should.

But a healthy pelvic floor isn't simply a strong one. It needs to be able to release fully, sense pressure changes, coordinate with breath, and respond automatically to whatever you're doing, whether that's a sneeze, a trampoline with the kids, walking down the street, or simply standing in a queue. If the jaw is holding chronic tension, and the breath and nervous system are caught up in that pattern too, no amount of squeezing addresses the actual root of what's happening.

This is also why pelvic floor symptoms can show up even in women who feel strong elsewhere, and why some women describe a real, noticeable shift once they start releasing jaw and facial tension alongside their pelvic floor work, often before they've changed anything else.

You're not imagining this, and you're not starting from nothing

If any of this sounds familiar, you're not broken and you haven't been doing it wrong. You've likely just been working with one piece of a much more connected system.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing more about how this connection works, what it actually looks like to train the body as one joined-up system rather than isolated parts. This holistic approach underpins the foundations of my six week Release and Reconnect Method programme. We are just coming to the end of the first round, and several of the ladies within the programme have been surprised to find out that they are, in fact, holding tension in their jaws.

"I had an a-ha moment when I realised quite how much tension I hold in my face."

"I am also aware that my jaw is more relaxed, as I didn't realise I had been inadvertently clenching it most of the time."

"I've definitely been more aware of breathing and jaw tension. I've noticed that I do occasionally carry tension in my jaw."

All of this coming from ladies dealing with the symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction.

So how do we notice whether we are clenching our jaws or holding tension in our faces? I have created the Facial Tension Test - a simple test to firstly draw your attention to tension you may not even realise you are holding, followed by a short sequence of facial tension release, which you can do whenever you feel the need for a quick reset, or whenever you notice any held tension.