Get yourself an Electric Toothbrush

Since most of my adult life was spent on hacking around and learning on my laptop. I didn’t spend much time worrying about my health. Especially dental and physical health.

Only after having tons of toothaches, some cavities and bad breath, I realised that things might be going out of hand and now I have to put some effort into taking care of myself.

At first, I just started over-brushing and honestly when you wake up in the morning and go for a brush, even 30 seconds feel like an eternity and then you rush to finish it. But after tracking time, I realised I was barely brushing for 15-20 seconds and thinking that I’ve been doing it longer. My mind had fooled me. Also the technique with which I was used to brushing was not effective.

So I got myself an Electric toothbrush, specifically the Phillips Sonicare. This was a thought through purchase, as it comes with a regular diamond shaped brush head unlike many which come with round brush heads and I’m genuinely weirded out by those.

The brushing technique is extremely simple:

• Put on the toothpaste and place it on a quadrant of your teeth and press the button
• Now hold and gently move around that specific quadrant
• After 30 seconds, it will automatically pause for a second during which you can switch to another quadrant of your mouth and clean it
• After 2 mins, it will automatically stop

Results after 1 week:

• Bad breath has gone completely
• My teeth look a lot whiter than before and a lot of people have noticed and complemented that
• I don’t have to think about how much time to spend on each quadrant and worry about my technique

The main pro for me is that It adds predictability to my brushing routing and it has less friction on a day to day basis. Because the higher the friction for a given task, the less likely you’re to do it.