Stress and Losing Your Voice

The most common cause of losing your voice is laryngitis, an infection that causes inflammation or swelling of the larynx. This part of the throat is commonly known as the voice box, as it allows us to make sounds by forcing air through it. This vibrates the vocal cords and we learn to make sounds that other people will understand.

When you touch the front of your throat you can feel the voice box vibrating when you speak. If the larynx becomes infected or inflamed the chords don’t vibrate at the same speed, causing the voice to become much lower. If the infection of the larynx is severe, the vocal cords may be unable to vibrate at all, causing a complete loss of voice.

Chronic Laryngitis and Stress

Usually, if you lose your voice it returns within a few days as the acute laryngitis resolves. In other cases, which occur rarely, chronic laryngitis develops and causes the voice to disappear for weeks. Prolonged bouts of chronic laryngitis can damage the larynx and affect the voice permanently. This is very distressing as it prevents good communication with others, it can be a problem at work and for parents with small children it can become very stressful.

How Can Stress Affect Your Voice?

General stress can strain your voice, as tension in the muscles of the neck and upper body can change the shape of the larynx slightly, and can cause the vocal cords to constrict. This can change the voice so that it becomes higher than usual. Other factors also come into play when we are stress – being very emotional, angry, upset and shouting or crying a lot can all make the vocal cords inflamed, causing the same sort of effects as laryngitis.

Occasionally, when people are under severe stress, one of the effects on the body can be a complete inability to make sound. This is not a problem that arises in the vocal cords; it is a psychological effect that makes the affected person completely unable to speak, even though the voice box shows no physical impairment. This is becoming more common in people with very stressful jobs, who are put under further stress because of the downturn in the economy. Having continual high levels of stress when one of the important functions that you perform is public speaking can trigger voice loss as a way of avoiding further stress.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

One of the extreme forms of stress that can result in not being able to speak at all, or only being able to communicate by whispering, is post traumatic stress disorder. This does not only happen to soldiers and other people involve in war, although it is common after being involved in some sort of conflict, particularly if it goes on for a long time. It can occur after being involved in a bad road traffic accident, being part of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or volcano or severe flood. It can affect people subjected to crime and violence, or to parents whose child or children die suddenly in an accident.

There are many other symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder and individual cases need to be diagnosed by specialists with expert knowledge. Treatments include anti depressants and long-term counselling and help.

Treatment for Stress-related Voice Loss

This can be very difficult to treat as a single symptom as the underlying cause of the stress needs to be identified and treated first. Speech therapy can be very valuable in training the affected person to slowly recover their voice and their ability to communicate by speech. This often takes months of hard work and so needs a high level of willingness to participate and keep up the regular sessions.