Aligners 22 hours a day: is that really necessary?

Every aligner pushes your teeth a small step towards their new position. That pushing only works as long as the aligner is around your teeth. If it is lying on the table, nothing happens. Not less, not slower. Nothing.

So those roughly 22 hours a day are not a house rule, they are the engine of your treatment. And the two hours that remain are there on purpose. You have to eat and drink, you have to brush, and you do that without your aligners in.

Add up an ordinary day. This has to fit into those two hours:

• your breakfast, your lunch and your dinner
• coffee, tea and soft drinks
• brushing and flossing
• that one biscuit during the meeting

Three times twenty minutes of eating is one hour. Add brushing and flossing and you are still comfortably within the time. Two hours is more than it seems, most people notice in the first week already, as long as you keep your eating and drinking somewhat together.

What helps most is this. Water is fine with your aligners in. Anyone who drinks water during the day instead of coffee all day long gains hours without doing anything for it.

This is the real question underneath. The honest answer is that one evening is no disaster.

Say you go out for dinner, it turns into a nicer evening than planned and your aligners are out for four hours instead of two. Your teeth move a little slower that day. That is all it is. If you put them back in according to plan afterwards, it usually catches up by itself and you barely notice.

What you should mainly not do on a day like that is make up the lost hours. Switching early works against you, because your teeth really need those days on the current step. Simply putting them back in and carrying on is enough.

And no, guilt is not required. A treatment of months does not ask for perfect days, but for a good average.

Then it becomes a different story. Not because something goes wrong in your mouth, but because your teeth structurally fall behind the plan. Your treatment takes longer as a result. Sometimes the next aligners also fit less well, because your teeth are not yet where the plan expects them.

That too is no reason for guilt, but it is a reason for an honest conversation. Just say at your check-up that you are not managing. Your practitioner can adjust the plan, build in extra steps or think along with you about what makes it so difficult in your week. Keeping quiet costs you more time in the end than owning up.

• Put your aligners back in as soon as you have finished eating, not in a minute.
• Eat at three fixed moments instead of snacking all day. At the office that makes the biggest difference.
• Keep a travel brush and the case in your bag. Then taking them out away from home is no longer a hurdle.
• Set one alarm on your fixed switching day.
• Switch in the evening, then you sleep through the first hours of pressure.

That last one is worth it. A new aligner feels tighter on the first day and that feeling is part of it. Usually it is gone again after a day.

Usually not, certainly not if you do it calmly. Clear aligners hardly stand out anyway, and taking them out can be done discreetly at the sink or just before you sit down at the table.

You do not need to adjust your diary for it. What does help is making a choice. Eat and drink calmly once, and then they go back in. That is more comfortable than spending a whole evening wondering whether to leave them out a bit longer. On the page about clear aligners you can read how little you see of them on an ordinary day.

Wearing time is the only part of your treatment where you are at the controls. How many teeth move, how far they have to go and how many steps that takes follows from your treatment plan and is fixed. How consistently you wear your aligners is up to you.

On average a treatment runs 8 to 16 months, and that planning assumes your aligners are around your teeth for about 22 hours a day. Stay neatly close to that and you stay on plan. Drop structurally below it and you extend your own treatment. It is that simple. And really that reassuring too, because you do not have to do anything extra. You only have to not give anything away.

More practical questions about daily wear can be found in the frequently asked questions. How a trajectory from scan to last aligner is built up you can read on the page about Invisalign.

Good question, and ask it out loud before you start instead of afterwards. Come and meet us, no strings attached. We look at your teeth and honestly discuss what a treatment would mean in your week, including the moments where it chafes. Get in touch and we will schedule an appointment.