This Micro-Habit That Can Change Your Life

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Will Durant

Every January 1st, millions of people around the world make resolutions to get healthier,
to get fitter, to make more money, etc. But 80% of resolutions fail by February.
Why? Because the foundational habits required to drive them towards their goals after the
first week of January aren’t there. In other words, without good habits, your odds of success
are stacked against you.

But can habits really change your life? Yes. And you can see the power of
consistency all around you. From Kobe Bryant who showed up to practice at 5 AM every day
to Warren Buffett who reads 500 pages a day, good habits can lead to massive success.

There’s a catch, though. Nobody, not even Warren Buffett, is born reading 500 pages a day.
Your key to success is micro-habits. Micro-habits are goal-related habits so small and quick
that you’d be embarrassed to tell your friends you couldn’t check it off your to-do list every day.
The significance of these micro-habits is negligible, but their psychological effects are powerful.
Consider it a mental hack. It’s telling yourself this:
This thing is important to me, I told myself I’d do it, and I did it.
If your goal is to get healthier, consider this micro-habit: tongue scraping.

Here’s a 6-step process that will take less than 60 seconds of your morning:

1) Wake Up
2) Check yourself in the mirror
3) Grab a scraper
4) Scrape up and down a few times to get all the yuck off
5) Rinse the scraper
6) Smile and enjoy your day

Follow these super easy steps and you’ll suddenly become someone who gets things done.
This feeling of accomplishment will help build momentum for you to accomplish bigger goals.

If you want to start tongue scraping but don’t want the extra responsibility of replacing yours
regularly, no problem. We do the work for you. Sign up for a monthly subscription
for just $1/month, and you can focus on building your micro-habits.

Dentists Need to get Creative to Retain Patients in a World of Marketplaces and Little Loyalty

My friend tells me she went to the Dentist the other day in New York City. She grew up in Michigan and typically goes to her family dentist when she's home visiting her family, but she was feeling like she needed a cleaning so she went on ZocDoc.com and within a few clicks she was booked for a cleaning at a dental practice just a few blocks from her apartment.

Owning a dental practice is not easy.

As a dentist, you’re a dedicated professional committed to your patients’ oral health. But patient retention is also important for the growth of your business.

So what can you do in a world of marketplaces and little loyalty? Here are 4 creative ways you can leave lasting impressions and improve your retention rates.

1) Ditch the White Coat

The white coat is a symbol of authority -- one attained only by countless sleepless nights and grueling board exams. Many dental school students dream of walking into an exam room in their white coats to heal the sick.

But the white coat (and gloves) also creates a sense of hierarchy, making some patients feel intimidated in the presence of a doctor.

White coats can also spread bacteria. One study found that doctors’ white coats were contaminated with all kinds of bacteria, including Staphylococci resistant to Penicillin, Erythromycin, and Clindamycin.

Here’s a solution -- You can simply ditch the white coat. Make your practice more welcoming and “cool” by getting rid of the barrier between you and your patients. If you need pockets, an alternative, such as a sleeveless neoprene vest, serves all the functions of a white coat without causing your patients additional stress.

2) Engage Your Patients with Unique Giveaways

When it comes to growing your practice, you don’t need to hire expensive marketing firms. That’s because nothing beats word-of-mouth referrals, even in this digital world.

But you need to be proactive in asking for referrals.

Set your practice apart with promotional giveaways for your patients, and they’ll do all the marketing for you.

The key to giveaways is choosing promotional items that are both functional and convenient.

Here’s a unique giveaway idea: tongue scrapers. Educate your patients on the use and benefits of tongue scrapers, and be sure to include some as a part of a gift for their loyalty. These functional gifts will strike up conversations wherever your patients go, which could lead to referrals to your practice.

ScrapeYourTongue.com offers wholesale Tongue Scrapers to dental / medical offices at a rate of $25 for a 100-pack: ScrapeYourTongue.com/100Pack

3) Redesign Your Office For Instagram

Does your office lobby make patients say “Wow”?

We live in a world where a picture of a salad can get thousands of “likes.” This means that in order to survive, businesses, including medical offices, need to rethink their office design to attract customers. And with more than 500 million daily active users, Instagram is the place to show off your artistic side.

So how can your office become one of the “Most Instagrammable Places” in your city?

Instead of displaying your diplomas throughout your office, take a page out of retail stores’ playbooks and go for a more photo-friendly setup, like unique art or furniture. Unique live plants are also sure to be a hit on Instagram.

While adding unique elements to your office, don’t forget that lighting is important to take great photography. Not only does soft, natural light relieve stress for patients, it can also result in some breathtaking photos.

4) Prioritize Patient Comfort and Stress Relief

The bone-chilling whir of a dentist’s drill can make anyone squirm uncomfortably. It’s little wonder why dentists are one of the most hated professions.

Some discomfort may be unavoidable, but there are things you can do to maximize your patients’ comfort.

For example, you can provide headphones with soothing music to drown out the sound of drills. Some dentists also have TVs with Netflix in each exam room so that patients could watch their favorite shows or movies during their procedures.

If TVs in exam rooms aren’t your thing, unique plants or interesting artwork/photographs may also work to take the patient’s focus away from the procedure.

Small things like artwork and goodie bags may seem trivial, but they can go a long way in getting people to talk about your dental practice. A dental visit strikes stress and anxiety in millions of people, but by engaging your patients and staying on top of social trends, you may soon have a long list of loyal patients.

Larry David's take on Tongue Scraping

Larry once said that the only thing he ultimately got out of his failed marriage was that Sheryl taught him about tongue scraping:


(Season 8 Episode 2) 


Larry also said. "The other thing was, I'm obsessed with oral hygiene. I floss constantly and she was really getting quite tired of it. I would floss in front of her and she'd be like, 'Don't floss in front of me anymore.' I was like, 'Oh, OK.' And I'm like, 'Tongue scraping, would that be OK?' Then we went out for dinner, she went to the bathroom and I tried to sneak a floss in. She caught me mid-floss. And that was it."

I have learned a surprising amount about Dental hygiene from Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. Tongue scraping is awesome. 

Head to ScrapeYourTongue where you can find the best tongue scraper on the market. Add this important step to your daily hygiene efforts and you won't regret it!

How To Check For Bad Breath

93% of people don't even know they have Bad Breath. This means if you have to think about it - you probably have bad breath. Luckily there is an easy way to check if your breath is smelly:

Take a silver spoon and slide it on your tongue to the back of your mouth. Hold it there for a few seconds and then take it out and take a whiff. If it smells bad then you have been awkwardly smelling awful in front of everyone you know for a long time. 



Best way to solve this issue is to scrape the bacteria off of your tongue. Bad Breath is formed in the back of your tongue and travels out into the world through your mouth. Get to the source of the issues by getting a tongue scraper and getting that Bacteria off before it puts you into any more smelly awkward situations.




check out Dollar Fresh Squad to get the best tongue scraper delivered to your door each month for just a few bucks: www.dollarfreshsquad.com

Why Everyone Should Consider Tongue Scraping (Huffington Post)

Claire McCormick, a Beauty & wellness enthusiast, book nerd, proud mama, and writer for the Huffington post. Wrote this piece on Tongue Scraping on July 28, 2016...

"There’s been a flurry of articles recently about the ancient Ayurvedic practice of oil pulling. Everyone from fashion blogs to CNN have been extolling the benefits oil pulling and recommending the best oil types with which to swish. Perhaps it is our newfound collective obsession with holistic living (of which organic oils are an integral part) that had oil pulling become so on-trend. Not that I’m knocking it — I’ve tried it and found it beneficial... albeit gross.

An Alternative to Oil Pulling

There is, however, another Ayurvedic practice that has not received the same love and attention that oil pulling has, but that has proven benefits to which I can personally attest. I’m writing this to set that record straight and shed some light on... tongue scraping.

Tongue Scraping? Sounds Painful...

It’s not. It is a quick, simple and extremely inexpensive practice (all you need is a $7 tongue cleaner!) that reaps many benefits. I call tongue scraping the “unsung hero of oral health.” I have been enthusiastically tongue scraping for years now, and I don’t see how anyone could try tongue scraping once, see the gunk you remove from your tongue, and not become an enthusiast as well. I therefore urge you to go out and start scraping today.

How About a Professional Opinion?

Kim Shamoun, a veteran registered dental hygienist and fellow tongue scraping zealot, says, “I can’t live without tongue scraping. Without a doubt, it should be a part of our daily oral hygiene regimen. I stress to my patients, friends, family and strangers alike how important it really is. A tongue scraper is the one thing I would want with me on a deserted island... forget the lipstick!”

Why Else Would I Do Something that Sounds Like Medieval Torture?

We all know about, and to some extent suffer from, morning breath. (Am I the only one that performs a huge eye roll when movie lovebirds play kissy face immediately upon waking? No one is doing that IRL. Get a grip, directors.)

Well it just so happens that tongue scraping is one of the best defenses against halitosis, period! And if you scrape regularly, especially before bed, your morning breath will be drastically reduced. Why? Think about it: It’s called “oral hygiene.” So you brush your teeth, you floss your gums, but that big plush carpet that sits on the bottom of your mouth gets ignored. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Actually, the soft, spongy, bumpy texture of the tongue is the perfect little breeding ground for bacteria! What you scrape off your tongue is this bacteria along with various other toxins (ick). This bacteria is odor-causing, so the less bacteria, the less smell.

How Else Does a Dirty Mouth Affect Overall Health?

Taste. Housing our taste buds is the tongue’s best-known role. But when your tongue is coated in gunk, your taste buds have no chance to fully enjoy that wild mushroom risotto, molten chocolate cake or any other delicious morsel. And decreased taste actually leads to decreased...

Digestion. We all know that digestion begins in the mouth; saliva is filled with enzymes that start breaking down food. And, you know, there’s that chewing thing as well. The cleaner the mouth, the better you can taste your food (i.e., the more “mouth-watering” it is) the better your digestion is!

Plaque. The more soft plaque you have on your tongue, the more hard plaque will form on your teeth. This leads to — yup — bad breath, but also tooth decay! As an aside, every time I go for my biannual teeth cleaning, my dentist compliments me on my at-home oral care. She’s actually told me “There’s really no plaque here for me to clean.” Thank you, tongue scraping!

Overall health. According to the Mayo Clinic (just one of many sources on this subject), oral bacteria and poor oral hygiene are linked to several other diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even infertility. At less than a minute a day, tongue scraping is the ultimate ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure!

You Might Be Saying...

You may read this and say (perhaps a bit smugly), “I do clean my tongue, with my toothbrush!” Well, your heart’s in the right place, but you’ve got the wrong tool in your hand. “An ordinary toothbrush is not recommended; it does not remove the micro-organisms from the tongue properly” says Shamoun. Just as the malleable surface of your multi-bristled toothbrush is optimal for cleaning the hard surface of your teeth, you need a solid surface (like a stainless steel tongue scraper) to really clean the squishy surface of your tongue. A U-shaped tongue scraper is where it’s at. I really like super-stylish Amano metal tongue cleaners; Shamoun recommends Breath Rx.

A Tongue Scraping How-to Guide

As I said, it is quick and simple, though timing does matter. Ideally, you want to tongue scrape as soon upon waking as possible, before you’ve eaten anything, drank anything or brushed your teeth. Just open wide (you don’t want to hit your teeth with the scraper), stick your tongue out and, starting from the back, glide the scraper over your entire tongue. Rinse it after each scrape. Do this at least five times, and/or until your scrapes come up clean, meaning you’ve gotten all the gunk off! You may want to do it in the bathroom mirror over the sink at first, so you can make sure you are getting to the back of your tongue. Then, once you’re familiar with the feeling of that, you can do it sans mirror.

“The most posterior portion of the tongue collects the most buildup, so you really have to make sure you reach far back. The frequency should be a regular basis, morning and evening,” advises Shamoun."

Follow Claire McCormack on Twitter: www.twitter.com/clairemcmack

You smoke? Here's how you can prevent the Black Hairy Tongue condition

Sounds f*cking ridiculous right? but yes, there is a condition called the Black Hairy Tongue. Even if you only smoke 'like once in a while when I'm drunk' you can still develop this condition which causes the tongue to become yellow, green, black, or brown, and give the appearance of being hairy. Basically you'll look like this Panda:



Which is actually pretty cool, so maybe you should keep smoking and not cleaning your tongue. But if you do want to prevent such a condition then you should probably scrape that nasty bacteria that builds up on your tongue from smoking. Dollar Fresh Squad offers you the best tongue scraper on the market. When you join the squad a fresh one is sent to you each month for just $1 (+$2 S+H).

Obviously I put a picture of what a Black Hairy Tongue looks like. Scroll all the way down if you wish...
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Cure hangovers with this simple trick

We've all been there. Drink all night and regret all of our decisions in the morning because of the pain and lack of motivation to do anything. It's fine sometimes, but other times we actually have stuff to do and can't let that hangover sit. Let me introduce you to the Tongue Scraper from ScrapeYourTongue.com

All that alcohol and other bad decisions (late night food & licking strangers) builds up some awful bacteria on your tongue. This bacteria can cause bad breath, sore throats, and even sinus infections. 

Using a Tongue Scraper, like the one that ScrapeYourTongue.com offers, is an easy way to scrape that nasty stuff off of your tongue and potentially cure your hangover entirely. Try it out - it's only $1

* Drink Responsibly!*