When illness strikes, singers face tough decisions: Should you sing? Cancel? Push through?
In this episode of Vocal Tips in 10, Amber Mogg Cathey walks you through how to care for and recover your voice when you’re sick — without setting your healing back.
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This episode is all about navigating sickness as a singer — understanding what your voice needs, what to avoid, and how to recover with care and confidence. Amber shares practical, experience-based guidance to help you listen to your body, support your healing, and return to singing in the healthiest way possible.
00:00 Introduction to Vocal Health and Human Vulnerability
02:31 Steaming: A Vital Tool for Vocalists
03:46 Knowing When to Sing: Pain vs. Performance
07:13 Medications and Their Impact on Vocal Health
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hello friends.in last week's episode, I gave you ways to keep a healthy voice healthy, which when we have the choice is the ideal way to go. Today, what we're going to be talking about is when we don't have a choice, which happens to all of us because we are humans with human instruments. The great part of having a human instrument
is they are so vulnerable and we connect to them so strongly because it's somebody communicating and sharing what's inside of them. The negative of having a human voice is everything that affects you as a human affects your instrument. And especially when we are moving into colder months here in the Northern hemisphere, which is the time when viruses and illness and all of that really start to ratchet up.
So today I want to talk about what you can do when you are sick, how you can get your voice back to healthy as quickly as possible so you can be doing what you love to do and that's using your voice.
And some of the best things that we can do to help recover our voice as quickly as possible when we're sick are the things I went more in depth in in last week's episode about ways to keep a healthy voice healthy. The two biggies when you are sick are rest and hydration because your body is your instrument. So again, things that are going to make you feel healthier as a human.
are going to make your voice feel better. Rest as much as possible when you are sick. That doesn't just mean vocal rest. Prioritize getting great sleep. Rest as much as you can. That's when our body recuperates, recovers, and then up your hydration as much as you can. Internal hydration is the huge one. Drinking water, drinking liquid.
eating water rich foods, things to keep you internally hydrated, then an extra hydration bonus that I feel like is so key when you are sick and you're trying to recover as quickly as possible is adding in surface hydration. For me, that's a steamer. Steaming I feel like is the most rehabilitative thing that you can do. there's all kinds of personal steamers. It's not about a particular brand
It's about finding whatever works for you, your voice, your life, your budget. But what a personal steamer will allow you to do is it has a mask that goes over your nose and your mouth. It utilizes distilled water. It heats up that distilled water into steam. And then you breathe that into your nasal passages and into your throat. The particles are small enough that you get surface hydration to the vocal folds themselves.
which drinking a great tea, having a yummy throat drop, those things can really soothe the throat, but none of that gets to the vocal folds themselves. Steaming does. You are getting moisture right to the vocal folds as well as really soothing your nasal passages and irritated throat, especially if you are stuffy or gunky. Man, I feel like steaming helps. It thins out the mucus. Like I said, it soothes everything.
I do it every single night as soon as the temperatures start to drop and the heat kicks on. So I'm already in a full loving relationship with my steamer every single night right now. Then when I'm not feeling well,
I up my steaming to morning and evening, sometimes morning, afternoon and evening. It feels so good. It helps hydrate everything so you vocalize with less effort. Everything feels less irritated. I'm such a fan of it. Also don't feel like you can't steam if you don't have the funds to go out and buy a personal steamer. That's not true. What I would recommend you do is heat up a pot of water on the stove until it is steaming.
Place your head over that pot And then I always recommend put it like a towel over your head. And all that does is trap the steam into that space so you're able to inhale more of it through the nose, through the mouth.
Another big question that comes up when people are sick is how do I know when it's okay for me to sing sick and how do I know when I should cancel? So here is my rule of thumb,
as a voice specialist. if you have a sore, painful throat, if it hurts to swallow, if it hurts to speak, if it hurts to sing, if it hurts, that is your body telling you, please don't use me. do not sing if you can at all help it.
Now don't get me wrong. If you are Beyonce getting ready to sing at the Oscars and you get hit with strep throat, you have a team of high level professionals that are gonna give you medication and steroids and all the things to get you through that performance knowing that you can crash out after. Most of us are not Beyonce. And if you can skip it, skip it. And what I always tell singers is try and think about the gain now.
versus long-term gain you might be like, I don't want to cancel this holiday gig tonight where I have to sing for two hours, even though my throat is sore. because I want to get in good with this place.
Okay, I understand that. Just know that if you are singing on a sore throat, you are likely making something irritated that does not feel well, feel a whole lot worse. If that's the only thing you have to do and you are willing to take that risk, that is your choice. But if you do that, you are likely gonna feel a lot worse, you're gonna sound a lot worse after. So if you've got a really important show, a recording session, or an opportunity in three or four days or even in a week that you need to be at your best,
you need to cancel that show It's short-term gain versus long-term gain. And only you can answer that, but that's something that I always want singers to think about
I feel like when we're stuffy and we feel kind of cruddy or you feel run down, again, obviously, if your body doesn't feel great, if you can skip it, skip it. But if you've got a performance and you're like, I feel okay, I'm just kind of like run down and congested, then I think you're okay to sing.
It's likely going to affect your total quality to a degree depending on how stuffed up you are because your nasal cavity is one of your resonators but you can do it and you like we are gonna cause any major issues i would also look at how long is the gig how long is the requirement that you have and how heavy are you expected to work.
And that's my next tip. If you have to sing or if you are able to sing, but you still know you don't feel great and you want to prioritize the health and the care of your voice as much as possible, modify, modify, modify. One, modify your set list. Take those songs that go up into the rafters or that take loads of vocal energy from you. take them off the set list if you can at all.
make your set list more sick person friendly, right? More songs that are in your speaking range that make you not have to work as athletically as hard because you're not at 100%. If you're not able to take some of those songs out of your set, modify the melody. Don't go for that big high note. Modify and do something different.
If you make it sound like a purposeful choice, that's all that matters. They're getting another rendition, a new rendition, a live only rendition of your song. Modify, modify, modify.
The other thing I get asked a lot about are medications. I'll have a lot of singers who will call me and clearly they're sick as can be and they don't take decongestants because they're like, well, I know it dries me out. talk to your medical professional always. But my thought is that is not our top priority. A little bit of dehydration, we can offset with more internal hydration, with surface hydration. If you can't breathe at all, take the decongestant.
If you are coughing like crazy, take the cough syrup, take the medicine that you need, if you think maybe a little bit of allergies are coming on, but you feel fine and you're wondering, should I or should I not pop the decongestant? Then I would be like, again, listen to yourself, but maybe skip it because it can be drying.
If you are sick and you can't breathe through your nose, take the decongestant.
And the last thing I want to touch upon is when it is time for you to sing. When you are not in that acute stage of your illness, it's time to start singing again. But you know you're not 100%. You know that your voice is swollen and irritated. One, don't forget the body.
When we are sick and things are swollen and irritated, all of these muscles in our body have a tendency to tighten up because they're guarding us, they're protecting us. So make sure that stretching, listening to your body, stretching out jaw, tongue, neck, shoulders, whatever you need to do, remember that your body is part of your instrument. And then two, you wanna start with gentle vocalizing, gentle SOVTs. The most gentle SOVT that also massages the vocal folds
themselves massages the laryngeal tissue that is SOVTs into water. So the two examples I talk about are the large straw, think boba tea smoothie size straw into water. When you vocalize gently through that, it could be one note that you start with. Then you start with small intervals, you expand your intervals as you start to feel better and better. singing through that large straw into water can help massage all of the tissue. Sometimes I have singers that that is even too much for them.
And so then I recommend cup bubbles. That's where you take a cup, put it up to your mouth with a little bit of water into it. And it's kind of like a lip trill. You get a little bit of a gargle at the side of the cup that massages the vocal folds, but with even less resistance. The other thing I love to focus on once that starts to feel good is gentle humming. H-N or H-M. Again, you can start with one note.
You can do little gentle slides, small intervals that you go back and forth on like a sliding third repeated, just helping to get movement, more flexibility back to the vocal folds.
And then you slowly ramp up from there. And then for real last thing. The other thing I want to bring up is when it is time to seek out a professional's help. When do you need to really think it's time to reach out to somebody? And when is it you need to give your voice more time?
The general rule of thumb is two weeks, not two weeks from when you are in the depth of the flu. Two weeks from when you are past the acute part of your illness, you are in recovery. tell singers is we should be feeling and hearing ourselves get a little better as we go along, right? If two weeks have passed and you don't feel really any improvement, you don't hear any improvement, that is the time to reach out to a voice professional.
Ideally, you want to be seen by a laryngologist. That is a voice specializing ENT. So they have everything the ENT has, but they also do more work specifically with the voice.
when I would reach out quicker, if you are a professional, and you've got a big holiday tour coming up and you get sick and that tour is just a week away, obviously don't wait two weeks. Call your general practitioner. Hopefully you have a team of people call your laryngologist,
Get some help, get some medicine, whatever you need, whatever they think you need to get yourself on the road of recovery as quickly as possible. The other time I would reach out for help sooner is if you have acute voice loss, meaning you go to yell, you go to sing, and you get this kind of feeling of discomfort and the voice is gone. That is a really good time to reach out to a professional as well. Otherwise, I had a lovely singer in the Vocal Pro membership last week pop up to one of our live coaching calls.
We have two of those a month as well as so much other stuff. I'll put a link below if you want to learn more about the vocal pro membership, but she was really stressing because she got really sick and her voice was not fully recovered. It had been less than a week and she had fully lost her voice and her voice was coming back. It was getting better and better. It just wasn't fully back and it had been like five days. And I told her, Hey, I don't blame you. feel the same way when I get sick,
Give your body and your voice time to recover. One thing she was doing is just trying to sing loud and high to see, it back yet? Is it back yet? That is like taking a bruised twisted ankle and going to run on it to see if it works well. Gentle movement, gentle things like your SOVTs into water. Gentle humming, starting on single notes, smaller intervals, expanding from there. As you feel better and better, you can ramp up. Listen to your voice, listen to your body.
Having a human instrument, being a human means you're gonna get sick sometimes. It's just part of it. And there are things that you can do to make your voice feel better, recover as quickly as possible. There's things you can do to keep yourself from getting sick as little as possible. And then sometimes you just have to rest and take care of yourself. I hope this is helpful, everybody. I am taking the next two weeks of November off.
I will be back at the 1st of December and I look forward to seeing you all then. Happy singing.
