Join Klaudia Mitura to explore what it really means to embrace your own voice and how simple voice practices can help regulate your nervous system, calm stress, and lift your mood in minutes.
Whether you notice your throat tighten under pressure, your voice rush when you’re overwhelmed, or you struggle to sound like yourself in important moments, this episode is packed with practical, science-backed tools you can use immediately (and that Klaudia tests herself).
Learn how a longer exhale can signal safety to the body, why humming can help you feel more grounded fast, and try a short “voice reset” you can repeat for three days to track your mood, stress, and energy before and after.
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Hello, happiness seekers. My name is Claudia and you are listening to the Happiness Challenge, a podcast where I test drive the best happiness hacks that science has on offer.
And this month we are exploring a question that may sound quite simple, but often I think it's overlooked. What does it mean to embrace our own voice?
And in the previous episode, 231, I was joined by Judith Quinn, multi award winning vocal confidence specialist and and a voice coach who helps people stop shrinking, taking up space, and speak in a way that feels authentic. And that episode is really powerful.
That conversation is just so practical and full of really interesting insights about our relationship with our voice. But one of the takeaways from that conversation for me was that our voice isn't just how we communicate, also a way to, to influence how we feel.
So today I'm taking a different angle and we're thinking about embracing our own voice as a nervous system regulator. A science based way to calm the body and lift your mood with tiny repeatable practices. So let's dive in.
We all know this from experience that when we are stressed, our body often shifts into kind of fret mode.
Our breath gets shut, swallow, our shoulders creep up, the jaw tightens, we hold so much tension in our jaws and the throat can really feel like it's holding on. And of course the voice will follow.
It can sound rushed, strained, higher, flatter, or you might notice you are speaking less or avoiding speaking at all.
And because our voice is ultimately powered by breath and sound vibration, small changes, how we breathe and vocalize can send our body a signal of safety. And when our body feels safer, our voice is able to come back more steady, more spacious, more sounding like us.
But before we dive into quick, practical tools of how to use our voice as this nervous system regulator, let's do a quick check in. This is often referred as a tension map. So the point on our body where we often hold tension.
It's really interesting that sometimes mentally we won't know we are stressed, but our body is absolutely holding the tension and stressing. So right now just really pay attention and think about, is your jaw clenched? This is really interesting, right?
We clenching our jaw sometimes with no, no awareness at all. What about your tongue? Is it pressed up to the roof of your mouth? Because if it is, that's great.
Because if it's not, having the tongue pressed up to the roof of your mouth means you cannot be clenching your jaw or is it tight at the base and your throat or neck, any tightness, scratchiness, or holding again, so much tension in Our neck.
And often if I cannot sleep, it's because I have so much tension around the neck and I need to really work hard to distress and release the tension before I can go back into sleep. And finally, your breath, is it high in the chest? Is it lower and wider? So we all know that stress loves to hide in the jaw, tongue and throat. Okay.
And that will of course impact our voice. So if you notice tension in any of these points, that is a really good information that we need to distress. Okay? We need to distress.
We need to regulate our nervous system. So inspired by Judith previous episode, he are here are three quick voice resets to try to help us with that nervous system regulation.
So first one, also mentioned by Judev as it's so important, so easy, but so crucial, it's humming. So humming is quite simple. It's gentle and it brings vibration into the system and that vibration can feel like a reset.
Interestingly, some people will be humming naturally when they getting stressed without even noticing. So for example, my husband, when he gets upset or stressed, he will starts humming, which is actually a signal for me that something has upset him.
He's trying to calm down. How can I help? So it's very simple. You keep your lips closed, let the jaw be loose and hum on a comfortable note.
It's not about loudness, it's just feeling the vibration in our jaw, in our ears. So you can do this for two minutes or longer or shorter depending.
And if you want to, and I know this may sound quite weird, if you want to really feel the vibration, you can press close your ears, you can press your ears so that way you're really concentrating on their vibration. So you just take a deep breath and we you hum. Hum. Okay. And after doing that for a few minutes, how you feeling?
More grounded, a little bit more present. What is it? What has changed?
And I think this is really interesting because in this humming exercise, I think what we concentrating on is not forcing ourselves to be confident, not forcing ourselves to change our voice to sound more confident.
We are giving our body the conditions and we regulating our nervous system so that our natural voice can return, which I think it's a really interesting shift. Now I completely understand that humming is not always possible.
If I'm in certain meetings on conversation when I'm getting stressed and maybe I need to do nervous system regulation, I cannot start humming, okay. In that particular moment in time. So the quickest way, the most effective way is the longer exhale reset. Okay.
So when we exhale for a longer, our body gets the message, I'm safe enough to slow down. So it's really simple.
We inhale gently through the nose about, for about three, four seconds and then we slowly exhale for about six to eight seconds like we are fogging up a mirror. So just simply 1, 2, 3, 4 and. Okay. So very simple. And that exercise, it's incredible because it can be done anywhere.
Very rarely people just don't notice if we suddenly excelling for longer. It's not something that people pay attention to.
So it's really interesting exercise, very powerful exercise to do on the spot in the moments that we need. And it is a moment of coming back to your own voice.
And it's really nice if you also pair it up maybe with a positive thought of I'm allowed to take my time or I am taking my time to just settle ourselves before we then take an action and speak up.
And the third practice is very much releasing the tension in the jaw and the tongue and again pairing up with some positive affirmations, but also changing the pace we speak with. That's what the jaw, the tongue as already mentioned, those are the places where the stress hides.
And what we're trying to do is letting our jaw hang slightly open just enough to create a space, placing our tongue softly behind our teeth and even massaging the jaw hinges for few seconds. Then swallowing once and taking one slow exhale.
Okay, and now maybe saying out loud or saying in our head something positive, but something also that allows us to slow down the pace at which we speak with. So I'm allowed to take my time, I can do the next right thing. I don't have to rush to be worthy. This is me, how I'm showing up.
And I really like some of these sentences because when I'm nervous I definitely, I'm definitely guilty of speaking faster. Whereas actually I want to come back to the pace that is natural to my way of being, to my way of communicating.
So I would really encourage you to try three day embrace your voice, reset. Okay, so here is your three day experiment that you can try for one day, for the next three days, just on one day, try two minute hum.
On day two, try one longer exhale, six to eight seconds.
And on day three, think about your jaw, resetting your jaw, massaging a bit your jaw and thinking about one kind of positive sentence and speaking it much slowly and maybe before and after rate how your mood changes, how your energy changes, any changes in your speech stress. So really I want to leave you with this idea that embracing our voice can be very practical.
It can be breath, vibration and pace and those are tiny shifts that tell your body it's safe to be in certain situations and that creates that space for being confident, for speaking up, for having that impact. If you try the three day reset, I would love to hear what you notice and how is it working for you.
But overall I I wish you wonderful the rest of the day. Until next time, keep test driving those happy next hacks with me. Bye bye.
