No smoking...please

Smoking is all-around bad news for your voice.

Cigarettes keep voice-producing tissues constantly irritated, and over time, tissues change as a protective mechanism. This is why heavy, long-term smokers' voices are often low in pitch.

Smoking marijuana is even worse, burning as hot as 400 degrees.

Smoking lowers the pressure in the valve joining the esophagus to the stomach, sometimes allowing stomach acids to "back up" in the throat and onto delicate voice tissues.

If this isn't bad enough, be aware that 85 percent of head and neck cancers are linked to tobacco use. Smoking cigarettes is a major contributor to the most devastating laryngeal disease diagnosis a person can receive: cancer.

At the very least, smoking decreases lung function. Without good lung power, more stress is placed upon the larynx when speaking or singing.

An auditory vacation

Did you know that music can be an excellent stress reducer? Tension is an enemy of easy, healthful vocalization.

Keep your cell phone well-stocked with restful music for moments when you need a lift. It's easy to store bunches of melodies of your choice, at a minimal cost.

Many advocate classical music (especially Mozart) as a stress-buster, but experiment with spiritual, country, jazz, blues or rock and roll. Or, install an app with nature sounds (such as rainfall or the ocean) to lift your spirits and deflate those tense muscles.

Recovery by the numbers

When it comes to recovery time, professional athletes have it made. Sports medicine research identifies appropriate recovery times for different stresses on body tissues:

• Professional basketball players play every two to three days;
• Baseball pitchers hit the mound once every three to four days;
• Title-contending boxers compete once or twice a year.

A general rule in the field of athletic training: Recovery times need to match the amount of localized tissue injury that has occurred. (Note: This does NOT mean recovery time needs to match performance time.) Acute damage to joints, ligaments, tendons, and other connective tissue, may take days, weeks or months to recover. Recovery from general muscle fatigue, though, is usually quick.

Even the most healthful speaking leads to wear and tear of voice tissues.  Usually, our bodies cope with the housekeeping and repair tasks well. But the high vocal demands of teaching may push the vocal system over the edge. New research may soon help teachers through the day by identifying the best balance between talking (lecturing) and non-talking (student-managed) activities. For example, what would the healthiest pattern during a two-hour block of teaching?

1) Talk 60 minutes, recover 60;
2) Talk 30 minutes, recover 30 minutes, repeating the pattern twice;
3) Talk 10 minutes, recover 5 minutes, repeating the pattern eight times.

Early results show that even small vocal "naps" (#3 above) interspersed with speaking reduces vocal fatigue.

A vocal diary: Teachers need not wait for scientific research to provide specific guidelines for voice recovery. Rather, we encourage informal experimentation on your own. Develop a simple vocal diary. Track voicing activities (including any episodes of screaming or yelling), hormonal cycles, symptoms of reflux disease, sleep adequacy, off-duty voicing demands, weather conditions, illnesses, allergies, alcohol use and other relevant factors.

Why is my voice so tired? As a teacher, your voice is your primary professional tool. Just for fun, let's consider how rigorously you use that performance tool as compared to another type of professional, for example, a pro bowler. Let's imagine that a serious bowler plays a couple games each day, six days per week. In bowling, the actual set-up and release of the ball is pretty quick, with periods of inactivity while the bowler waits for the pins to reset, the ball to return or a competitor to perform. Thus, in an average game, the bowler may spend 10 minutes or so actually performing. If we calculate the bowler's performance time per week, we find that - out of the 10,080 minutes each week - the bowler performs about 120 minutes. To discover a bowler's rest to performance ratio, we divide non-performance time (10,080 - 120) by the performance time (120) . We find a rest to performance ratio of 83 to 1.

A teacher, on the other hand, usually works five days per week. Assume that a teaching day is 7 hours (420 minutes). [According to research, the average teacher speaks cumulatively about one full hour.] However, teaching younger children or subjects that require extensive speaking (i.e., foreign language teachers) usually requires more talking. If you coach or direct other extracurricular activities, factor those minutes also.

1. Estimate the number of minutes you spend speaking each working day and multiple it by 5 (working days). Subtract from 10,080 to discover your non-performance time =
2. Divide that number by your performance time = ___
3. Do the math (or grab a calculator). What’s your ratio?

Most teachers find that they ask their bodies to significantly out-perform professional athletes.

Some food for thought

Research shows that even though teachers work about seven hours a day, they actually talk only about one cumulative hour on the job.  Is 1 of 24 hours in a day too much talking?

Consider: what do you do when you're not teaching?  Sit at home and say nothing?  Probably not. The same type of person who is attracted to the teaching profession (outgoing, helpful, comforting, social) is also drawn to activities that may be vocally demanding. Whether you use your voice on the job or off, it's still the same voice.

And then there are the compulsive talkers.  Some people use speech as an outlet for emotional overload: anxiety, unhappiness, anger, giddiness.  Some individuals seem to feel obligated to fill silences with ummms, ok's, sure's, or similar phrases.  They literally talk away the day.  All the added speaking can make your daily word count skyrocket.

Some strategies for healthy vocalization have more to do with your ears than lips.

Take for example, the Lombard Effect. It's simply your adjustment of vocal loudness according to the loudness level you hear. You've likely noted the comical, overly loud manner in which a person wearing a Walkman speaks. Consider situations when the Lombard Effect has influenced your speech: chatting in cars or restaurants; social gatherings; the classroom. How many times have you found yourself Some strategies for healthy vocalization have more to do with your ears than lips. Remember: loud talking is particularly taxing to the vocal tissues. We theorize that some people may be hyper-sensitive to the Lombard Effect, and may be speaking at a volume far above what is truly necessary to be heard. In other words, don't overdo the Lombard.

Are you susceptible to the Lombard Effect? How loudly we speak is so closely related to the volume of what we hear that we often try to "talk over" background noise without even thinking about it. Try it for yourself: how would you say, "Students, please be seated," inside the quietness of the school's library? Now, say the phrase imagining you are in the noisy school cafeteria. Did you feel the difference?

Vocal cell wear and tear:  After looking at the microscopic slides of vocal tissues below, you'll likely better understand the concept of vocal cell destruction. The image on the left was made before the experiment began. After four hours of constant phonation, look at the after effects of the same tissue (right).  -  from the laboratory of Dr. Steven Gray.