MTD Vocal Freedom

‘Thoughts aren’t facts.’ On a scale of 1-10, how much do you believe that statement?

In some ways, we spend our whole lives problem-solving. From how to get a promotion at work to when to wash our hair (manoeuvring around exercise schedules and camera-ready events is no easy task!), we are used to thinking problems through. Problem-solving serves a valuable function in our lives.

Many of us spend a lot of time in our heads, but we aren’t really aware of our thoughts. We’re running on automatic. We pick up our phones without even realising and scroll unconsciously, out of sheer habit. As a society we have started to operate mostly from our heads instead of being grounded in our bodies, and we’re chronically overstimulated. Yet we still put our brains on a pedestal, deeming them reliable and trustworthy enough to come up with all the solutions to our problems. Assuming that all of our thoughts are legitimate.

This is a very understandable, but harmful, mistake.

There was a time when all I did was think about my ‘voice problem’, and how to solve it. How to not lose my voice, how to vocalise efficiently or ‘right’. Do you know what it did for me? It made things 100x worse.

The trouble is that we assume our thoughts are always useful and logical. But a lot of our thoughts aren’t.

Especially when it comes to MTD. Instead of just doing the vocal exercises I was given by the ENT doctor and trusting the process, I was overanalysing vocalisation. I was trying to take control of the process… because I was scared. I had been a chronic over-achiever and over-doer for a long time, and that had always reaped rewards for me. So it’s natural that when I was diagnosed with a voice problem, I tried to take control and work as hard as I could to correct it.

However in my case, this involved chronic overthinking. Every day I obsessed and theorised about how to vocalise efficiently, in an attempt to protect my voice from further fatigue and vocal loss. I would experiment with the way I was vocalising and think, ‘what about if I do this?’, ‘Or this?’ ‘Or this?’ I was thinking about it, and worrying about it, CONSTANTLY.

But, as Penman and Williams write in their BRILLIANT book ‘Mindfulness: Finding Peace In A Frantic World’,

“People genuinely believe that if they worry enough over their unhappiness they will eventually find a solution… but research shows the opposite – in fact, brooding reduces our ability to solve problems: and it’s absolutely hopeless for dealing with emotional difficulties.”

It was desperate and futile. Not only could I not ‘solve’ this problem through overthinking, but by constantly worrying about it my body started to receive the signal that I wasn’t safe. And what happens when your body receives this signal? Tension arises as it prepares to fight the danger, freeze, or run away from it. Worrying put myself in a state of hypervigilance, inviting more tension (the exact thing that was getting in the way of my efficient vocalisation!)

To those of you who have been told you have MTD – I totally understand the confusion and fear you may feel. I grasped onto overanalysing the technicalities of vocalisation because no-one told me that MTD was fundamentally an emotional issue.

But MTD IS an emotional issue – one which your brain can’t solve.

Believe it or not, your voice problem is your body’s way of communicating with you that something is not right. The solution isn’t thinking and worrying and getting in even more of a tangle. The solution is emotional release, processing, and finally healing. Somewhere along the line you may have interpreted that your voice wasn’t valuable, good enough or you didn’t feel safe expressing certain emotions growing up, and held them back. The way out is through.

So, if you get anything from reading this post, I want you to know that the first thing to try to do (I know it’s hard) is to get your body out of fight or flight. MTD is an emotional issue, and trust me when I say that worrying about it only fuels more tension and stress.

Creating a feeling of safety and being able to recognise overthinking and overanalysing is so important in your journey to a healthy relaxed voice. It will help you with all the emotional work ahead too. Try reading ‘Mindfulness: Finding Peace In A Frantic World’ as a first step to creating calm in your life again.

From there, you can think with more clarity, and you can start the healing work needed.

If you’d like to get in touch (even just to say hi) I’d love to hear from you. I try to post every week! Please get in touch if you need to talk or would like coaching. I’m here to help – you are not alone.