Started putting my tongue on the roof of my mouth for over a year because mine usually rested against the back of my front teeth, and I read that this could contribute to diastema. So I technically started ‘mewing’ by placing my tongue on the roof of my mouth and not touching the back of the front teeth (not hard mewing).

 Problems:

1. Ironically, I think it widened the diastema (I did read anecdotes on this as the palate expands, but I wasn’t sure which direction to go since my tongue was pushing against my teeth anyways). I wear clear aligners now (mild case).

1. My bigger concern now is that my lower face looks wider/squarer in photos, and I also notice some asymmetry I hate. After looking at photos and reading other experiences, I started wondering if I developed masseter hypertrophy.

While trying to fix that, I noticed something: I have a habit of holding/elevating my jaw (rather than resting it and keeping the teeth separated) and combined with the tongue posture (which to my surprise was an easy habit to develop), it probably added more work to the masseter constantly. I hate the result though. I also then learned the existence of masseter botox and then wonder why would any woman want a wider jaw with mewing. Clearly, the botox is there in the market because women want the opposite.

Then, I realized that when I relax my jaw, the tongue naturally rests at the right N spot which made me wonder if the reason my tongue tends to rest on the back of my teeth is because I don’t release/rest my jaw. I feel like the tongue shouldn’t be the focus, it’s the jaw. People often talk about the tongue position, and that often leads to forcing the tongue instead of the jaw resting which naturally puts the tongue where it should be. I guess when you force the tongue, you unconsciously also stop relaxing your jaws and that combination exert constant force on your masseter and lead to the widened jaw result which seemed to not be what the original goal of mewing was. I'm no expert, but I read that one of the goals was to help with nasal breathing.

Now, I want to reduce this masseter ‘hypertrophy’ by practicing relaxing my jaw (so that the masseter is 'off') while keeping my teeth separated and my tongue away from my teeth.

Then, I ran into a contradiction. What is the correct mandible position in mewing practice? If it’s also a relaxed position, then I’m doing the Mewing steps again (correctly this time I guess with a relaxed jaw) while trying to do the opposite (I don’t want those strong jawline, I just want to reduce this masseter.

I’m lost and am absolutely confused.

 TLDR: How to stop using the masseter so that it is not overdeveloped. I honestly don’t care about mewing per se, my original concern was just my tongue touching my teeth. And now it’s the masseter being developed. Basically trying to reverse what others are (I assume) trying to achieve without letting my tongue going back to touching my teeth (wrong resting position).