When you start thinking about how much of your life you spend doing certain things that are just considered essential parts of caring for yourself, you may be quite shocked. For some parts of life, the final result will be staggeringly time consuming (sleep, for instance, takes up about one-third of your time here on Earth if you’re sleeping eight hours a night). When it comes to your brushing and caring for your teeth, however, you may be shocked to discover that what sometimes feels like a lot of concentration and effort isn’t what you thought. Let’s talk more about your oral health in terms of seconds, minutes, hours … you get the idea.

Every Single Day

How much time do you think you spend brushing your teeth every day? When we just isolate the time you spend gently scrubbing your teeth with your toothbrush (which, if you’re doing it as we suggest, requires two minutes of brushing in the morning and at night), you’re spending a tiny little segment of time: Four minutes. For oral health that lasts, this is not much of an interruption to your day!

Every Year

Perhaps figuring out how much time you spend brushing to keep your oral health safe on an annual basis will help put things into perspective a bit more. So, if you spend four minutes brushing every day and there are 365 days in a year, we can multiple those terms out to arrive at: 1,460 minutes of brushing. Divide that by 60 minutes (in an hour) and you’ve got just over 24 hours of brushing for an entire year. That’s only one full day. Not bad!