Are Your Hygiene Skills Up-to-Date?

While most people memorized the principles of good dental and personal hygiene long ago, not everyone fully understands the importance of sticking to those principles. It can be easy to grow lax in your hygiene routines, both dental and personal, as you go through the same routines multiple times every day. To help make sure your hygiene skills and practices are up-to-date, we review some of the most important aspects of them, and how you can improve them if you haven’t been as diligent as you should be.

Keeping up with good dental hygiene

Dental hygiene and personal hygiene are similar. They both revolve around cleanliness. For your oral health, that mainly means keeping your teeth, gums, and oral tissues clean of the bacterial plaque that can form on them every day. Cleaning away these bacteria is essential because many of them are responsible for different oral health conditions, like tooth decay, gum disease, and chronic bad breath (halitosis). Cleaning them away consistently is important because once plaque calcifies, or hardens, you won’t be able to brush or floss it away at home anymore. This means the bacteria will have a greater chance of leading to trouble later down the road.

The importance of good personal hygiene

Good dental hygiene is just one part of a good overall personal hygiene routine, which should include things like washing your hands thoroughly and on a consistent basis. Before and after eating a snack or meal, for example, you should wash your hands or at least clean them with hand sanitizer. This is especially important during cold and flu season, when germs can spread easily through coughs and sneezes, clinging to multiple surfaces and transferring themselves to other people as they touch those surfaces.

How to make the most of your hygiene

Whether you’re focused on dental or personal hygiene, one of the most important things to remember (and easiest things to overlook) is the important role of consistency. If you only brush and floss your teeth once in a while, or every other day, then you aren’t effectively preventing the buildup of oral bacteria on their surfaces. It doesn’t take long to plaque to form, nor for it to calcify into tartar, which means an inconsistent hygiene routine can almost guarantee oral health problems in the future. Personal hygiene helps protect the rest of your body from harmful germs in much the same way – with a strong focus on consistent cleanliness.

Learn more about improving your hygiene

Good hygiene isn’t just about brushing and flossing your teeth, although that is a very important part of it. To learn more, call our Cleveland Family Dentistry office in Cleveland, TX, today at (281) 592-1234. We also serve the residents of Kingwood, Conroe, Livingston, and all surrounding communities.