Stress doesn’t just affect your mindset—it affects your voice. In this episode, vocal coach Amber Cathey explains why high notes often feel harder or disappear entirely during stressful seasons. Learn how tension in the body interferes with vocal stretch, and hear simple, practical ways to calm your nervous system, release physical tension, and regain access to your upper range.
0:00 - Introduction and Listener Question
0:17 - Effects of Stress on the Body
1:12 - Addressing Stress with Breathing Exercises
3:13 - Physical Stretches to Relieve Tension
4:16 - Vocal Exercises for Relaxation
7:51 - Movement Techniques to Reduce Tension
9:43 - Conclusion and Encouragement
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Hi friends. Thank you for being here. Today's episode is going to be focusing on another listener question. And I know it's a question a lot of singers have, so that's why I want to cover it today. The question the listener asked is, why do my high notes seem to disappear anytime I get stressed?
So let's get into it. When we are stressed, what happens to our body? one of the first things that happens to me is it tightens up, It's in this like protection mode. my breath can become a little bit more shallow, Everything just feels
a little tighter, more guarded, Well, what do we need for great high notes? when you go to sing higher pitches your vocal folds thin out. They stretch, and as they stretch to hit those higher pitches, the vocal folds themselves get thinner.
and they vibrate more quickly. Well, if everything is tight, doesn't it make sense that the part of your voice that needs stretch, freedom has a really hard time.
So if you are one of those people where you find that stress makes those high notes a lot more difficult, just know there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your voice. It's all pretty natural. Stress makes everything tighten. And that's the exact opposite of how our voice needs to move to hit those high notes.
So then the question becomes, okay, great, what can I do about that?
The first thing I want you to think about before you are singing, if you know that you are in a stressed state, is let's try to address that first. one of the ways that we can really help address that is through effective breathing exercises. One of my favorites is to inhale,
for whatever amount of counts you would like. I generally do about an inhalation for 10. And then the key is the exhalation. The exhalation we want to be at least double. When we exhale, that's when the vagus nerve is triggered. That's when the parasympathetic nervous system is triggered. You can watch, I have an Apple watch on for any of you watching me on YouTube. I am so nerdy about this when I'm feeling really kind of high strong. I will do my breathing exercises and watch my heart rate
lower on my Apple Watch. it just something about me, I think it's the control free can be, but it makes me feel like, hey, even though this feels a little out of my control, it's not, I have tools for it.
So the inhalation with at least a double exhale, I do an inhale on a sip in and an exhale on a hiss. That's great for us as singers too, but that's not really the focus right now. The focus right now is to kind of calm the nervous system, get the body out of that stressed state.
Another one that can be really helpful is box breathing. And I find one of the most helpful things for me with box breathing is you have to count, which gets my brain off of whatever might be stressing me. So an example of box breathing would be, inhale on that sip again, let's say we inhale for five beats.
then you pause, you hold that for five beats. I hesitate to say hold, because I don't want people to be like, ⁓ because that's stress and tension. So just think pause for five beats, exhale on a hiss for five beats.
and pause for five beats. So think about that makes a box. Five beats of inhalation, five beats of pause, five beats of exhalation, five beats of pause. That is your box and you can do that as many times as you need.
The next thing I would suggest is physical stretches. When we get stressed, like I said, the body tightens and we want to think about all those places in the body that can really affect the voice, pretty significantly. So I go to the jaw. Subsequently, the jaw works with the tongue, your neck, your shoulders, your rib cage, right, your abdominals So any stretches, whether it is a full body roll down,
of like what you would do in yoga. stand up tall and then you're going to end up hanging like a rag doll, but you're going to think about moving each part of your body on its own. So you kind of tuck your head down. You roll your shoulders. You think about each vertebra rolling down until you were hanging and then you come up the same way. That's a great one. Shoulder rolls, Neck rolls side to side, massage of the jaw, massage of the tongue. I would try to get the body
as relaxed as possible because again, the body is our instrument and when we're feeling stressed, it's going to be tight, which is going to impact our voice across the board, but really significantly impact those high notes.
Then when it comes to vocalizing, a great exercise if things are feeling tight for whatever reason is singing through a large diameter straw into water.
You take that large diameter straw, put it in the water, usually about a half inch to an inch. You're gonna play with what works good for you, wrap our lips around the think, ⁓ but sing through the straw and you will see.
bubbles happen. Those bubbles are great airflow, but one of the great benefits of this exercise, which is a type of semi-occluded vocal tract exercise, partially closed mouth, partially closed vocal tract, is that that change in the water pressure genuinely massages your vocal fold tissue and your laryngeal tissue. So it goes right to the source of our singing.
and massages, it helps us get some more freedom. So let's say we've done our breathing, we've kind of calmed our heart rate, relaxed our body a little bit, then we do our physical stretches, check in and see where are we tight? Where can we do some targeted massage, some tension release? And then the straw in water lets us go right to the voice itself.
One of my favorites, SOVTs, so things like a lip trill, a raspberry, a tongue trill. There's so many others. Those can be great. None of them are going to give you the massage effect like the straw in water. That for me is like the mother of all, the granddaddy of all. So that's a great warmup. The other thing I want you to think about when it comes to vocalizing whenever you are stressed and getting worried about those high notes is that we can't
force high notes. Really, we can't force anything in singing. Force might get us there in the short term. It's not gonna do anything for us in the long term. It's not gonna sound great and it's not gonna be the healthiest option either. So it's not the way to go, force. But especially for high notes where you need to stretch. Think about that's like forcing yourself into the splits. No, thank you. I immediately am like, ⁓ gosh, that really ripping and tearing, not good. I'm not saying ripping and tearing will happen with your voice, but.
You can't force it. It's the same as that. It's like forcing yourself into a deep yoga position. So exercises that are great, like I said, maybe start with that straw into water and do sirens. We're just getting your voice stretching. So sirens are just like a fire truck, an ambulance, low to high, high to low.
Ooooo
you do it through the straw into the water. You do it on a lip drill.
Just sirens are a great way to get things moving, the vocal folds connected, blood flowing, get everything a little bit stretchier, a little bit more flexible, especially if you've done some of these other steps that we've talked about. And I'm not saying you need to do every step every time you go to sing high notes and you're feeling stressed.
But I would play with all of these and figure out what works best for your body. The other thing I would say is one of the exercises I love for upper register is a sliding interval, So let's say a sliding third, three notes apart.
There's my siren, but it's a baby version.
If that feels tight, going from lower to higher, start at the top and descend That automatically lets that stretching, thinning muscle, your cricothyroid muscle, your CT, do you need to know that muscle? No, but in case you want to know, there it is. Start at the top and just descend. ⁓
sometimes just changing the direction of that interval can make things feel better. And any kind of sliding exercise that requires more flexibility, I love across the board, but I find especially helpful for the upper register. And then the other thing I would say is movement. The opposite of tension and tightness is movement.
So there are great moves we can do when we are singing our high notes. Let's say we're doing that sliding third. There's one I love called the tippy bird. You want to think about those plastic birds that tip their beaks into the water. We're gonna tip at the hips. And as you go to sing that high note, you're gonna tip forward.
Tippi Bird.
that one. You can also, some people really lean forward. Another one I love is like a little bend of the knees as you go higher. What it does is if you're already feeling kind of stressed and you know that when you're stressed your upper notes take a hit, well then we get into our head and mindset becomes a big piece of it and we're like ⁓ crap here it comes this is gonna be horrible. Well what does that make our body do you guys? It makes it tighten more. So things like bending the knees whenever you go for that high note, a little mini squat.
override your brain thinking, let me get up there. When the body's physically moving down, it can't think up and down at the same time. And it gets that tendency to want to push and pull up, adding even more tension out of the way. Also I love to while somebody is warming up, if they're feeling tight, get one of those big yoga balls or exercise balls, one of them that you can sit on and bounce around on it. Just bouncing up and down. I'm bouncing up and down if you see this on YouTube in my chair right now.
just helps your body free up, right? Let your hips sway right to left. Sometimes if I can tell a singer is tight, we've done stretches, we've done breathing. I will have them as we're doing exercises as they're warming up. Just swing their arms side to side like a full body sway back and forth. You can turn your head right to left if your neck is tight. You can do like little figure eights, Movement can be so incredibly helpful.
especially when things are feeling tight. So I know I jumped into a lot of things, but I love this question because it happens to all of us. I don't care what level of singer you are. Stress impacts us, how we feel emotionally and mentally very much impacts us physically. And our physical body is our instrument. That is our voice. Everything is connected. So I wanted to give you different ways to tackle this.
we're looking at ways to trigger our parasympathetic nervous system to lower the heart rate. We're looking at ways to kind of override maybe mindset that is a little tight and stressed out. We're looking at ways to release tension in the body, ways to go and release tension at the voice, exercises that help get that voice stretching and then movement that help us really get out of our own way. That's what so much of this.
is about. And then here's the great news. If you're feeling stressed and you play with these tools and tactics and you realize, okay, I'm able to sing, I'm able to hit those high notes, I feel better, singing is such a great stress reliever. It releases endorphins just like exercise because singing is an athletic activity. It increases the oxygen in our body.
It helps regulate our nervous system. If you sing with other people, there's such benefit to that. Singing is so good for you when you're stressed. So I hope that some of these tools and techniques, you can play with these to help those high notes feel better when you're feeling stressed as well as everything. So you can sing and feel even better. If you have questions, topics, things you want me to cover on this podcast,
Please leave them in the comments. Please send me a message. You can DM me on Instagram. My email is always below. is support at ambermogcathy.com. I would love to hear from you and make sure that this podcast is helping all of you that are listening as much as possible. Also don't forget, I have a fantastic Vocal Pro membership. You get two weeks free. I also, right now, you wanna talk about singing in feel good. I have a five minute.
sing-along audio track vocal warm-up with a bonus belt exercise available. All those goodies, like always, are down in the show notes. Thank you all for listening and can't wait to see you in the next episode.
