Like many people across the UK today, I woke up a little groggy at my usual wake up time. Why? Because the clocks had changed. This meant that my usual wake up time of around 6am was actually the equivalent of an hour earlier than normal – so 5am.
And boy, did my voice FEEL like a 5am morning voice.
What is morning voice? What causes it?
The short version is fairly understandable. No one expects to be able to wake up and be able to ask their body to be on top form IMMEDIATELY, right? No one can do a personal best in running or the gym upon waking. Our voices are no different.
We grasp that our body needs a little time to wake up from sleep. This is partly biological, and partly neurological. Our body has to do certain things to get us to sleep, do body “house-keeping” while we sleep, and then it needs to pack all that away as we wake up.
There’s a myriad of factors that can come into play, including some more serious health issues, but let’s cover the four most common things that most of us can recognise in our voices:
1. Body waking up
The muscles involved in singing have not been used for however long you’ve been asleep. This includes the vocal folds and vocal tract. This means they may feel sluggish and unresponsive, or at least imprecise in what you are asking them to do earlier in the day.
Even if you are lucky with your physiology and you can get reasonable function out of your voice within an hour or two of waking up, almost everyone should notice their voice fares better after a few hours of just being awake. This is an important theme throughout this article.
I start sessions with clients from 10am onwards, so I wake at 6am daily to just allow my body and voice to acclimate to the day. I am literally just leveraging the benefit of time to allow my voice to warm up from sleep, even before exercises. No special knowledge required.
That way when I start work on my voice, it’s already been warmed up through awakeness for a few hours. Nothing feels harder than trying to start your voice up within an hour of waking up, let alone trying to do anything precise with it.
2. Healing and recovery in the night
Sleep is when our body does it’s best healing and repair work. This is why your voice can feel incredibly hoarse after just one night of bad sleep – the body didn’t get a chance to do it’s repair work. Prolonged insufficient sleep can also wreak havoc on voices. As an on-off-again insomniac, I can attest to this.
As we sleep, any muscular wear and tear is repaired. Additionally, a protective outer layer of mucus on the vocal folds (mucosal lining/epithelial layer) gets a chance to be replaced/replenished.
What I’ve noticed is that if I’ve had even one day of extensive voice work and singing, even with no strain or damage, the next day my morning voice is a little bit more mucus-y than normal. My conclusion is that the body recognises more of the lining was damaged the day before due to heavy use, and so more is placed there for recovery purposes.
Again, give it an hour or two from waking and it’s more or less back to normal (almost like the body is a miraculous thing that knows exactly what to do!), but this excess mucus will in turn contribute to morning voice.
3. Potential allergies
Many people have very mild allergies that don’t affect them in noticeable ways day to day. This could be dust from sheets, pollen or seeds when sleeping with the window open, etc.
When we sleep, these allergens can aggravate the lining of our sinuses or throats, and we wake congested or inflamed. This in turn can stimulate excess mucus, leading to a very gunky morning voice. There may even be slight swelling in the tissue due to these allergens, making the voice seem lower than typical.
Again, a few hours after waking these symptoms tend to abate somewhat, though the severity does vary from person to person.
4. Mouth breathing
Some of you may snore, or breathe heavily through your mouth. You may notice that your throat can feel quite dry in the mornings, and may also feel a bit mucus-y also.
When we breathe through our mouths, we dry out the lining of the throat. Mouth-breathers also do this during the day, but saliva, swallowing, and drinking water often alleviate or mask this issue.
At night, we can’t do any of those things, so as we breathe heavily through the mouth the throat dries itself out. This can make things feel a bit rough in the mornings. Sometimes this impacts even the vocal folds themselves. Mucus is something the body generates to protect itself, so some people may also find this dry throat also has a mucus-y goodness attached to it.
Again, after a few hours of awake-ness these symptoms tend to reduce/disappear, but they are often very noticeable first thing in the morning.
Conclusion
A lot of stuff happens (or doesn’t happen) in the night that means our voices can seem a bit worse for wear first thing in the morning. While there are many suggestions I could make on protocols to improve these issues (e.g. reduce dust or allergens in your sleeping environment, keep a bottle of water beside your bedside, get good regular, consistent sleep, etc), in most individual cases, you just need to give your voice time.
Morning voice is an aggregate of many factors that all boil down to having been stationary and asleep for many hours. MOST of these issues will reduce/disappear after a few hours.
The key bit of advice I would make is to be gentle with your voice for the first two hours of your day. Sure, some gentle warm-ups are good, but know that morning voice is entirely normal and not something you should rush away.
All of that mucus may be annoying, or that heavy feeling might be unpleasant, but assuming there’s not an underlying cause, trying to exercise your way out of it or cough the mucus away will only aggravate your voice. Trying to force your way through it is like trying to nail your heaviest bench press after you just rolled out of bed – you’re going to hurt yourself eventually.
Any of this sound familiar?
If you keep finding your voice very rough first thing in the morning, or for extended periods throughout the day, this could be a sign there is something more serious wrong. You’re welcome to book in via my booking form right here if you’d like to explore this together.