The Z-Score is an at-a-glance way to give a numerical value or score to your teeth clenching/grinding. It combines data about how hard and long you bite each time you sleep and divides it by the number of hours you slept. That allows you to quickly and easily compare your teeth clenching/grinding night by night to recognize trends like improvement or worsening.
It is important to look for trends in your data over time. Various factors impact our sleep quality, our stress levels, and other things that can cause us to clench/grind our teeth more or less on an individual sleep. You may even notice or remember having a particularly stressful day, having consumed more caffeine than usual, or not having gone through your usual sleep routine. The opposite can also be true – you might have had a particularly relaxing and stress-free day where your eating and sleeping habits were all excellent. Just as those days might not represent the normal states of life, days when your Z-Score is particularly high or particularly low might not represent the true state of your teeth clenching/grinding UNLESS they are part of a larger trend.
When you use your Zerene in training mode, the goal is to see a Z-Score that gets lower than from your baseline and then generally stays pretty low relative to your baseline. A single night that is higher is not necessarily cause for concern. Keep going with your training and keep an eye on the trend. If you become concerned please reach out to the Zerene Coach.
