What do you mean you've shifted? If your tongue is still on the roof of your mouth, just what shifted? Am confused

Posted by: EddieMoney

What do you mean you've shifted? If your tongue is still on the roof of your mouth, just what shifted? Am confused

Ah, I mean like I turn my head in my sleep, or shift my position from sleeping on my left side to sleeping on my right. If I fall asleep on my back, I sometimes wake up on my side.

There have been other nights that I haven't moved at all, but my jaw simply relaxes. Lips still sealed, tongue against my palate, but then teeth no longer together by the time I wake up.

Posted by: Sclera

Or does it not mean anything, and the important bit is to keep the tongue up and the lips closed?

This is correct, your teeth do not need to touch to progress/make progress. There's absolutely no consensus here or in any professional circles (including the Mews) whether the teeth actually need to be in contact. "Either lightly touching or slightly apart" is the line, often said as a single sentence by myofunctional professionals and Mew in multiple videos.

So your teeth touching/apart is not the issue, to get that out of the way.

The reason that you experience tightness when waking up compared to at the end of the day when you go to bed: When you're awake and pushing the tongue up, and reminding yourself throughout the day, you're causing more lateral/transverse pressure than is present when you are asleep.

When you push up, the tongue flattens out and pushes out against your alveolar process/molars. You're flexing the tongue so it's pushing harder sideways. When you go to sleep, your tongue stays up there but relaxes and doesn't flex except for swallowing - which allows the alveolar process/molars to rebound slightly back to their previous position.

I required the expander as a retainer when I still used to wake up with my tongue out of proper position so that I wouldn't lose all progress every night. BUT:  Once you start waking up with the tongue still up there, you're actually retaining most of the progress that you made throughout the day. It feels more narrow in the morning compared to the previous night, but each morning (and night) is progressively wider than the one before it.  Your tongue was flexed during the day and pushed everything more than it would relaxed, and your relaxed tongue at night kept everything from rebounding back to its normal position. Like so:

Why does it feel  like you've lost a ton of progress at night? Your tongue and mouth is an area of the body which has a disproportionately massive amount of nerves and sensitivity to slight changes. Check this out: 

A cortical homunculus is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and proportions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, or sensory functions, for different parts of the body. 

Any changes whatsoever in your mouth tongue area feel MASSIVELY disproportionate, because your tongue/mouth area is vastly and intricately mapped in your brain. You only lost a tiny amount of the space that you gained throughout the day, but your brains map of the tongue/mouth is so massive that it feels like you lost a lot more. 

You can use an expander as a retainer but I personally opted for Damon braces because I wanted to keep posturing my tongue while sleeping. Braces mount on the outside so you have the full space inside your palate while maintaining retention from the braces.

Thank you, @admin! That definitely makes me feel a lot better.

@abdulrahman -- that's good to know! I was thinking of ALF, but not for a while, and not unless several things don't work ahead of it.

I was looking to get Alf too based on Dr. Mew recommendation but it was unfeasible in my area. In the end I gladly opted for Damon braces because unlike the Alf I could continue posturing my tongue with them on. The first 6 months were very slow, but in the 2 months since I have seen fast improvements.