Why brushing harder is quietly wearing down your gums

It is an easy assumption to make: press harder, clean better. In practice the opposite is true. Plaque is soft and lifts away with light contact and a little time, while hard scrubbing mostly abrades the things you want to keep.

Over months and years, heavy pressure wears a wedge into the enamel near the gumline and pushes the gums to recede. Recession does not grow back. The tell-tale signs are new sensitivity to cold and teeth that look a little longer than they used to.

The fix is not to brush timidly, it is to let the brush do the work. A sonic brush is already moving thousands of times a minute; your job is to guide it gently along the gumline, not to scrub.

If you tend to bear down, hold the handle with your fingertips instead of your fist, and switch AuraOne to Soft mode while your gums settle. After a couple of weeks most people retrain the grip without thinking about it.