Four, Seven, Eight
What can you do when anxiety hinders your ability to speak up?
Have you ever noticed your voice shake when you speak? Perhaps you’re in an unfamiliar environment or a new company. Conversely, you know the people and place well, but it is the words themselves that feel unprecedented, unsaid. I’ve had my fair share of shaky-voice incidents, though recognition of these moments tends to arrive just before I open my mouth. I instead discern them by what first takes place in my throat. A certain tightness, a dry compression and contraction, floods that area of the body. Cruelly, my awareness of the corporeal event generates further tension within, as I anxiously await the more visible symptoms to inevitably—and publicly—flag my inner constriction. If still compelled (or feeling obliged) to speak, the right eye twitches, swallows are ill-timed, and, of course, the voice breaks and shakes.
It’s a longstanding affliction of mine, although not unique to me. In school, to be called upon to speak in class meant at least a couple of vocal quivers, even for the most confident of pupils. Then, there were those who utterly despised the act of reading aloud. Eyes down, mumbling and cursing the teacher who subjected them to this humiliation. I fell somewhere in the middle, often wanting to contribute, but not wishing to be seen as wanting that. My demeanour of affected indifference overrode the guttural quakes that occasionally emerged. Though rarely taking the opportunity to speak, I nonetheless welcomed any chance given with open arms, even if my face conveyed a rather different story.
Yet, I was no stranger to pharyngeal limitations. They simply occurred outside the classroom, more often than at my desk. I noticed that, around certain schoolmates, my voice became smaller, croakier. Time and time again, when speaking in front of these people, I felt the need to clear my throat of some sort of congestion or blockage. Despite being vaguely aware of also feeling less comfortable, less myself, in their presence, it was a long time until I made a direct link between this and my increasingly tight throat.
In fact, it was years before I saw any correspondence between my emotions and my body. Yes, I perspired when nervous, cried when sad, felt hot when angry, but these concepts were familiar to me from infancy, cropping up frequently in early curricula and children’s books. Less common was the idea that your feelings can cause entire body parts to tense up, clench and wring, in a process that sometimes feels more subconscious than crying itself. Without the audible change in my voice around certain individuals, I am unsure whether I would have been aware of the persistent strain in my throat.
Indeed, all evidence suggests I would have dismissed such a suggestion as utterly ridiculous. During these years, an older friend of mine told me that she had stayed in a therapeutic centre as a teenager because of anxiety that manifested as a shrinking sensation in her throat. When the stress had gotten so severe as to render her virtually silent, her parents felt it necessary to look beyond the conventional doctor’s visit. There were others on the retreat experiencing similar issues and, after some weeks of holistic rehabilitation, she told me they had been cured. The details of how this was achieved have not remained with me as much as the notion that my friend’s throat had become a sort of vessel for her worries. Perhaps I remember this part so acutely because, at the time, I didn’t buy it one bit. Yet, all I had was her word, which she had never given me reason to doubt. By the time I met her, she had become a singer and guitarist with a number of live gigs under her belt, so accomplished in her second language that she was studying an undergraduate degree in English. Whether it had been before, self-expression was not an obstacle for her any longer.
My cynicism met its match when I began attending speech and drama classes that same year. Here, I learned about the importance of the breath. For the entirety of my first ninety-minute class, I lay in a supine twist on the floor and breathed in and out, in and out, in and out. These breaths were deeper and fuller than those I was used to. They came and went from the pit of my stomach, rather than my chest. As the heat travelled up and down, it warmed my throat, oiling it for use. According to my drama teacher, this ‘diaphragmatic breathing’ was crucial to projecting one’s voice while performing. After all, what’s the point in reciting Hedda Gabler if no one can hear you? We spent the start of every class in this same way and, though it was challenging initially, I was soon able to summon breaths deep from within. The beneficial effect on the volume and richness of my voice was undeniable—squawking became a thing of the past—but there was something in the way I felt, too: calmer, more confident and able to hold a room, the same way my friend did at her gigs.
Now, almost a decade after my final drama exam, I’ve forgotten most of my monologues and wouldn’t be able to tell you very much about the Stanislavski Method, but one thing that has stayed with me is the value of breathing. I’ve since lain in many supine twists, no longer on the floor of a drama classroom, but in yoga studios and my bedroom, as I release and let go of the day’s worries with each inhale and exhale. Simultaneously, the most available and most powerful tool we have in our possession, the breath’s ability to ease tension and anxiety, indicates the deep interconnectedness between our bodies and our feelings. If you’re anything like I was, perhaps this seems like such an obvious statement that it doesn’t require thinking about. But to breathe, really breathe, through tension, is the most foolproof method I’ve found so far to alleviate a twitchy eye, a shaky voice and a tight throat.
In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.