Change Your Brain Every Day - How Hurting Your Voice Hurts Your Brain - Set Your Voice Free with Roger Love Part 2

Episode Date: February 23, 2017

Can your brain be affected by your voice? Listen to this episode and learn what Roger Love thinks about your voice in relation to your brain.  

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amen. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen.

Hi, I'm Tana Amen, and I'm here with my amazing husband. Dr. Daniel Amen. And we are here with our friend, Roger Love. This is one of my, just so much fun. This interview is amazing. So I love this because I know that your voice can really empower you. You know, we've all seen powerful speakers on stage and we're drawn to them. The Anthony Robbins and these people, we can't sort of resist. And then you also have seen people where you're like, why did I just spend an hour doing that? It can be disempowering. So it's really important. Finding your voice is not just important for all the reasons we talked about in the previous podcast, but because it actually makes you feel empowered or disempowered and has that effect on the people listening to you. So I love that. So in this one, in this podcast,

we're going to talk about all the things you do to hurt your voice that might be disempowering you. So welcome, Roger. Thank you so much. All right, let's get straight to it. Here's one of the things that people do to damage their voice. They speak too airy. They think that if they have a therapist voice, a doctor voice, a caring voice, if it has a lot of air in it, that people will just be moved by them and this gentling into every conversation that they think that this is heartfelt. But the truth is, when you speak airy, so much air comes through your throat and dries up all of the moisture on your vocal cords so that they get red and puffy and swollen and you lose your voice. So you might've been really sweet and kind to that person at nine o'clock in the morning, but by lunchtime, you don't have a voice. Speaking airy makes the voice go away, makes it hoarse. So you want to speak with the right amount of air, not just airy. Also,

it's a wives' tale and we shouldn't blame the wives. It's just a bad tale that speaking airy is somehow sexy and inviting. Actually speaking airy is perceived as weakness. If I walk into a meeting and I'm like, I really want you to hire me. And that, well, then that person is thinking I would hire you for the bedroom, but I don't think I should put you in the boardroom. So is that why people are scared of me all the time? I hear this crazy thing that I'm scary. I'm like, I don't speak airy, never have. So I'm just kind of curious now. Not me. No. So you have a beautiful blend of air and cord. So that's why you speak. And that's why

you're perceived as strong. So don't speak airy all the time and your voice will be healthier. Here's another thing. People often fall into what I call the squeaky hinge. And this is the sound right here. They think that somehow this is appealing. That sounds familiar. Well, it should be because about 90% of every single person on the planet who speaks does this. And you're like, come on, Roger. Yes, here's where they do it. They do it right before a comma and a period. So they're speaking, I really love chocolate.

I really love golf. And they run out of air by the time they get to the end of the sentence. And they think, well, just one more word. Like they're being paid by the word. And so when they run out of air, they fall into squeaky hinge. And they don't know it. So when you record yourself, we've all got these fancy little phones now. And you can record yourself, we've all got these fancy little phones now and you can record yourself.

And when you record yourself speaking, you listen to how you sound when you get to a comma or a period and you fall into that squeaky edge. That is basically also making your voice tired and rough and red. And it's basically telling people don't even listen to the last word I say before a comma. Don't listen to the last word I say before a period. So is that in part why as people age, they start to have that squeaky hinge voice? You can always tell on the phone when someone's older or younger. And it's just really interesting. Yes. When people get older, they think that their voice has to sound old. Those people are wrong in the same way that you prove that people's brains can still be young if you do what you should be doing. I've proven that people's voices can stay young forever. You just have to learn some specific things. For example,

people stop breathing correctly. So air comes into the body and then you're supposed to use that air to make sound come out and ride out on that air as it exits the body. So air is the vehicle to deliver your voice to other people. But people get lazy with breathing, especially when they get older and they end up breathing like this. Shallow breaths where they breathe in through their mouths and raise their chest and shoulders and then down. Shallow breath and then down. That's called accessory breathing. And that doesn't get enough air into your body to fuel your voice.

You need to learn how to do diaphragmatic breathing. You breathe in through your nose. You pretend you have a balloon in your abdomen. You need to learn how to do diaphragmatic breathing. You breathe into your nose. You pretend you have a balloon in your abdomen. You breathe in, fill up the balloon. You won't look fat. Trust me. And then when you speak, your stomach comes in the whole time you're speaking. Most people's stomachs are stationary when they're speaking. So they're like cars with no accelerator pedal. And they can't drive up the hill without an accelerator pedal. You have to learn to breathe into your nose, pretend you have a balloon in your stomach, and then only speak while your stomach is coming in. That's simple. I teach people how to do that on my website. I teach

people how to do that in my new book, Set Your Voice Free. Simply changing the way that you breathe changes the way that air comes back out, gives you more volume, more strength, more beauty, more power, and you won't lose your voice and you won't sound 100 when you're only 20. Well, and that's part of what we teach our people is belly breathing for your brain. So we used to say what's good for your brain is good for your heart. Now it's apparently good for your voice as well, correct? Well, and if you watch a baby breathe or a puppy breathe, they breathe almost exclusively with their belly. But as we

get stressed, breathing changes from your belly to your upper chest where you're not moving as much oxygen. And the faster you breathe, the more anxious you get. And it's stressful. So one of the things I learned 30 years ago was teach people diaphragmatic breathing and their level of stress went way down and their ability to speak went up or their ability to sing. And I always use the example of people who play wind instruments are less anxious. But one of the problems are beautiful women who wear tight clothes because when they wear tight clothes, they can't stick their belly out when they breathe in and they have more anxiety. And so don't wear things that are constrictive just because you think it makes you look cute. Because if you're anxious, you're not as cute.

You're less sexy and your voice is not as strong. So I would guess then that bad posture makes it worse too. So breathing, airy speaking, what are some of the other things we do that harm our voice? I know I came to see you because if I would be on a speaking tour, there would be times, especially if I got a cold, I would lose my voice. And I'd go to the ENT and get a Medrol pack. And I didn't really like putting steroids in my body to decrease the inflammation, but I felt stuck.

And I've not done that actually since I worked with you. But what were those bad things I was doing besides being on planes and not hydrating? Yeah, you don't like drinking water. So we had to really focus on that. And that was one of the things that we changed. You people don't understand that if your voice is dry, if your throat is dry and you drink water right then that that does that doesn't help your vocal cords at all because there's two holes in the throat, one for food and liquid and one for air. And when you

drink, everything goes down the food and liquid hole, but the vocal cords live down the air hole. So you have to be constantly drinking so that your bloodstream carries the water to the cords. You can't just drink when you're dry. And the bloodstream carries the water first to all vital organs. So the vocal cords are at the very end of the list of who gets water. Also, there are sounds that we make, places in our voice that literally create more pressure on the vocal cords. So if you're going to run and you want to win the race, what do you do as a runner? You stretch, you stretch, you stretch your muscles. What do you do when you go to the gym? You stretch. What do you do after you do weights? You stretch because you don't want to hurt the muscles.

Well, the vocal cords are not muscles, but there's lots of muscles that deal with the vocal cords moving the way that they move. So they have to be trained like muscles. And the exercises that I taught you, doing fun things like, gug, gug, gug, gug, gug, gug, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, mum, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, for a few minutes a day, literally make it so that the muscles that are involved in speech become so amazingly capable of creating sound. All the pressures go away. All the pressures go away.

All the tensions go away. All of the straining goes away. And then you're left with what the instrument is capable of doing, a beautiful, free, strong, healthy instrument that you speak with and you don't lose your voice. And then you can make it create incredible sounds. It's awesome. It's really great. All right. What other habits do we have that hurt our voice? Why does, you know, my big fear in life

is Bill Clinton used to be a very powerful speaker, one of the most persuasive speakers. But in the last decade or so, his voice has become squeaky. It's become like a hinge. It's clearly old. And I don't want to have a voice like that. When I'm 90 and I'm in front of a crowd, I want it to be just as powerful as when I was 40. Beautiful. Let me tell you and your listeners and my new friends exactly how to avoid that and some things they can do right now. We've already talked about breathing in through the nose. When you breathe into the nose, there are filters in there called turbinates. The air becomes moist so that it moistens your throat, moistens your cords. So you're not going

to get an old voice if you're breathing into your nose. We talked about doing belly breathing and only speaking while your stomach is coming in. Now, I want to talk about how we do descending melodies that hurt our voices. Most of us, as we get older, and a lot of young people too, unfortunately, instead of speaking from a low note to a high note, the song goes low and then it goes higher from low notes to high notes. Instead of using melody like that, we do descending melodies. We start out on this note. Hi, my name is Roger.

And we just go down lower from a high note, lower, lower, lower. Well, when we go from a high note to a low note, just like a sad song, I love chocolate, but I don't have any more. I ate it all. Every time I go from a high note to a low note, I depress the hell out of the listener. Because when melodies go from high to low, the subconscious says, oh, that makes me sad. High to low. And when we go from high to low, we also generally go from loud to soft. So then we're going, oh, I really get softer. And the ends of the sentences fall off. So in getting softer, we're getting airier, which is making the chords drier. In going from high to low, I love golf. We're making people sad and we're aging the voice. So what you should do,

breathe the way I'm saying and speak with ascending melodies. I really like Tana. I love Dr. Amen. You two are my friends from low to high. And then make sure that the last word before the comma or the last word before the period is loud and full of air and strong. And then you are energizing the voice, using the muscles and making people happy. Because when you go from low to high, you're making people happy subconsciously. So I remember one of the things that you taught me that actually surprised me was when your voice is starting to get strained, don't whisper. Talk about that. When your voice starts to sound strained, when you start to hear yourself hoarse, you think, oh, I better take it easy and then whisper.

But whispering is harder on the voice than screaming. Oh, wow. So when you start to feel strained, here's what you do instead. You pretend that you are Yogi Bear. And those of you that are old enough to remember Yogi Bear, Yogi Bear spoke like this. Hey, boo-boo, I see a picnic basket.

And what I'm doing now, even though it sounds funny is i'm taking my adam's apple check this out and i'm lowering my adam's apple watch this mom mom mom mom mom so if i talk like this mom i can i can talk like yogi say that for me i can talk like yogi i can talk like yogi when you make when you make that sound your adam's apple comes down lower your throat opens up and your vocal cords stretch to a place that makes them less so if you do this as funny as this sounds and this is this is so proven i've proven this with i've had people artists that have 50 000 people out there and they have no voice and i do this for 10 minutes and then they

get out and sing for 50 000 people and the sound goes like this instead of Instead of in your nose, if you go, This is called low larynx exercises. And it's that simple. You don't need to go to the doctor and get a shot. You need to lower your Adam's apple, stretch your vocal cords the specific way that they will then go back to their normal position. And you're good. So interesting.

So all weekend, we're going to talk like Yogi Bear to each other. Chloe's going to be like, what the heck happened? I love it. It'll be like this. Honey, I really like what you're wearing. And then she'll be like, thank you, Yogi. Oh, that's so funny. Stay with us.

We are going to come back and talk about all the things you can do to strengthen your voice and be your best self. We are here with Roger Love. Set your voice free. Learn more about Roger's workorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing

where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.