Our vocal apparatus performs an important communicative function: thanks to our voice, we communicate with others, convey important information to them, and some people associate the ability to speak or sing with their professional activities.
The state when the voice goes down or disappears cannot be called pleasant or comfortable. The problem of the missing voice is especially acute for those who have chosen the so-called speech profession: teachers, singers, announcers, etc.: along with the missing voice comes temporary disability. Therefore, a person’s desire to urgently restore his vocal cords is quite logical.
In medicine, a condition where the voice is lost or diminished is called aphonia.
There are many reasons for aphonia, and they are not always associated with a cold, as is commonly believed. Accordingly, approaches to treating a dry voice also differ.
Why does the voice shrink? What are the causes of hoarse vocal cords? What quickly restores a dry voice? How to urgently restore the ability to fully speak or sing? Quick voice restoration is the topic of our new article.
How does our vocal apparatus work?
Before we deal with the reasons why our voice disappears or shrinks, we need to understand how our vocal apparatus works. The air leaving the lungs as you exhale encounters certain obstacles on its way and collides with them, thereby leading to the emergence of sound vibrations. If nothing interfered with the air, sounds would not be formed, which means we would not be able to speak.
Such a natural obstacle to air flow is the larynx, or rather the vocal cords located on it. The vocal cords are folds in the lining of the larynx. There is a gap between them. When a person is silent, the gap is wide open. It narrows when talking or singing. The air passing through the ligaments causes them to rapidly oscillate and vibrate. This is how a sound wave arises and a voice is born. It is quite logical that if the voice disappears or shrinks, then the problem is related to the vocal cords and a malfunction of the vocal apparatus.
How can an elderly person regain strength after a long illness?
Loss of strength after illness in older people is often accompanied by bad mood, grumpiness, and sleep disturbances. This can be the onset of depression, which must be dealt with immediately.
Below we will talk about the main available methods for restoring strength.
Establish nutrition
After illness, nutrition plays a critical role in recovery. Try to make it more balanced. There is no need to completely limit yourself; food should be enjoyable, which is especially important during the recovery period.
Some diseases may be associated with exhaustion of the body, emaciation, so it is necessary to organize nutrition and increase portion sizes gradually. Healthy foods will help replenish the amount of protein that is responsible for immunity.
Be sure to include lean meat, vegetable broths, dairy products, fruits, and vegetables in your diet. Limit the consumption of stimulating drinks, salt, sugar, and unnatural foods, as they only increase the load on the body.
Maintain drinking regime
After an illness, the body, especially the elderly, needs a lot of fluid. Drinking water will remove harmful products from the body that were formed during illness. To improve immunity, you can also drink decoctions of various herbs, freshly prepared compotes, jelly, teas with lemon, milk or honey, freshly squeezed juices or your favorite fruits, vegetables and berries.
Regular good sleep
The body recovers during sleep, so it is recommended that a person get full sleep during and after illness. During sleep, the body's defenses are activated.
Sleep will also help improve your overall condition and improve your mood, as a night's rest restores and strengthens the nervous system.
Water treatments
Water can help in recovery not only from the inside, but also through external influences. It washes away the remaining waste and toxins from the body, cleanses pores, improves blood circulation, and also relieves tension and relaxes.
A contrast shower has a beneficial effect. Elderly people should approach the procedure with caution. Do not immediately set the shower to a low temperature. Start with your feet and increase the area of impact. You should not immediately start with douches, as this may provoke a relapse of the disease.
Start doing exercises
Even older people should definitely do physical exercise, which should be approached consciously. Consult your doctor before starting exercise, as the aging body is quite fragile, so the complex will include special physical exercises that take into account your characteristics.
It’s enough just to start every morning with basic exercises to warm up your joints and muscles, and the recovery process will begin to proceed faster.
Walks
Stay outdoors more often. After your morning exercises, go for a walk in the park or just to the store. Your body will be saturated with oxygen, which will become a catalyst for replenishment. If there is a forest near your house, then breathe in the healthy smell of coniferous trees. Walking is also physical activity, which, as mentioned above, will have a positive effect on the condition of the body.
Positive attitude
A negative mood will not help in the fight against the disease. Therefore, older people are recommended to spend time with pleasure, play with their grandchildren, and watch their favorite films on TV. The support of relatives and loved ones will play a huge role in recovery. This is especially important for older people.
Why does my voice disappear and go silent?
Most people associate the condition when the voice disappears and decreases exclusively with a cold. But only a fraction of diagnosed cases are associated with colds. In reality, there are many more reasons why the ability to speak normally is lost, and they are not always associated with infection or ENT diseases.
Let's figure out why the voice shrinks or disappears. It is very important to correctly determine the cause of the malfunction of the vocal cords. This directly determines how you will need to recover.
- Infectious diseases.
- Overstrain of the vocal cords.
- Neoplasms.
- Problems with the thyroid gland.
- Nervous stress.
- Allergy.
- Bad habits.
Most often, the ligaments shrink due to inflammation of the mucous membrane of the larynx - laryngitis. With laryngitis, the ligaments swell and lose their ability to vibrate quickly. Aphonia can also be triggered by a cold, pharyngitis, sore throat, tracheitis and other inflammatory processes in the laryngopharynx. When the ability to speak fully is lost due to infection, the patient usually also complains of a sore throat. The “culprits” of the malfunction of the ligaments in these cases are viruses, bacteria and fungi.
Very often the voice shrinks and disappears due to increased load on the ligaments. This problem is often faced by representatives of speech professions, for whom the vocal cords are a full-fledged working instrument. Such professions include singers, teachers, announcers, tour guides, call center operators, and sales managers. Their ability to speak is lost due to overstrain of the ligaments, which inevitably leads to aphonia. For such patients, quickly restoring the functioning of the vocal apparatus is a priority! But don’t think that only professionals have a voice that shrinks and disappears. It’s enough to have a good time at karaoke with friends or scream a lot at the concert of your favorite performer, and in the morning you are guaranteed to feel what it’s like to have shrunken vocal cords.
Sometimes the ability to speak normally disappears, seemingly for no apparent reason: there is no cold, the vocal apparatus has not been overstrained, or has not sat down from shouting or a long conversation. In order to quickly restore your voice in this case, you need to urgently consult an otolaryngologist. Quite often, aphonia is a consequence of the appearance of laryngeal tumors. The ability to speak loudly, by the way, disappears not only with tumors of the larynx, but also with neoplasms of the thyroid gland or lung area. And how quickly you visit an ENT doctor and how urgently you diagnose the problem depends on how quickly you recover!
Friends! Timely and correct treatment will ensure you a speedy recovery!
Diseases of the thyroid gland can provoke the appearance of chronic laryngitis. This condition must be treated urgently and quickly. Moreover, restoration of the vocal apparatus must begin with treatment of the underlying disease. High-quality and quick treatment of diseases of the endocrine system will restore the sonority of speech.
How often do we hear the phrase: “All problems come from nerves.” And there is undoubtedly some truth here. If a person spends a long time in conditions of constant stress, peace disappears, full sleep disappears, if he has to constantly experience nervous overstrain, then the body can react to this with the appearance of aphonia. The only way out in this situation is to urgently restore mental balance and calm the nervous system. In this case, you need to recover not only with the help of an ENT doctor, but also with the help of a good neurologist or psychologist.
The larynx is quite susceptible to irritants. Upon contact with allergens, swelling of the larynx occurs, which leads to the ligaments shrinking and the ability to speak loudly and sonorously is lost. To urgently restore the previous healthy state of the larynx, it is necessary to eliminate contact with the allergen and urgently consult an allergist.
Smoking is a very common cause of aphonia. All harmful substances that are part of a cigarette have a detrimental effect on the larynx. How to recover in this case? There is no magic pill. A person simply sits down, thinks carefully about his condition and urgently makes the only right decision - not to smoke anymore! A lot of patients subsequently leave their reviews: “I restored my vocal cords as soon as I quit smoking.” All in your hands!
As we can see, there are many reasons why ligaments shrink. To recover quickly, you must urgently consult a doctor to determine the cause of aphonia.
An ENT doctor is responsible for quickly restoring the functioning of the vocal apparatus. Sometimes doctors of related specialties join him.
How to quickly restore mental and physical energy?
Fast recovery is my professional need. Intensive work with people; continuous innovations in projects; mountain treks to altitudes above 4000 meters three times a year; Frequent flights and crossings, and sometimes “crossings”, when a tiny fishing vessel on waves sweeping inward passes a two-hundred-meter cargo ship in open water, persistently require effective actions to replenish one’s mental and physical energy.
Here, of course, there is a great temptation to show off the famous:
– How do you relax?
- Yes, I don’t strain myself.
But the ability to maintain mental balance in any situation is a characteristic of three types of people - masters of a high level of self-awareness; those who do not leave their comfort zone, and those who do not leave their comfort zone, but are sure that they are masters of a high level of self-awareness.
If you, like me, are no stranger to overheating, I want to share my arsenal of self-healing. I will deliberately omit methods such as massage and other measures where other people are involved. My instruments are as mobile as possible and allow them to be used both in Moscow and on a tiny tropical island with a population of a couple of hundred people, when no outside help can be expected.
So, how to quickly restore mental and physical energy?
My Top 7 Personal Self-Help Techniques
Dream
With sleep, as with energy expenditure, the rule applies - not too little, but not too much. Lack of sleep, as well as oversleeping, leads to an imbalance in the body, just as too intense activities can cause burnout, but insufficient energy expenditure also makes a person slow, internally sticky, and inert. In everything you need to strive for the dynamic balance available to your body and psyche at the moment, gradually working to expand your own capacity.
For most people, the golden mean is 7-9 hours of sleep daily. And if in a normal state eight hours are enough for me, then in a situation of even slight stress or some kind of physical problem, I give myself the opportunity to sleep for 9 hours. At the moment of a more noticeable surge, about 10 hours are already required, but at a time, and for dessert, in an acute situation - long intercontinental flights or a series of non-stop retreats - ideally, a continuous 12 hours in bed. Even when I wake up, I continue to lie down and fall asleep again. A healthy psyche is restored with this approach in just one night.
Switching activity
Another elementary truth that manages to constantly trip over various thinking patterns. For example, that relaxing on the couch is to blame for all our illnesses or that a book is our best friend in any situation. Yes, but not so. Switching is because you are changing the pace that led you to blackout to exactly the opposite. If you have been working at the computer for a long time, if the screen requires your endless presence, the best switch is movement, air, nature. Missing one eye spot. And not a book, for example. Yes, the book will calm you down, but it will not give you a recharge, since a complete switch was not achieved with this approach.
And vice versa. After flying and moving, when you visit 16 islands on a work visit in less than a month, the best relaxation is lying motionless in bed all day with a series of endless movies or, yes, a good book. One or two days of this regime completely brings you back to life, and you want to run and create again.
Switching activities for full recovery requires a literal understanding of this process, while simply following your addictions and rest habits will provide some release, but a reset may not happen.
Water
What properties are not attributed to water! You will find rituals with it in almost all religions, shamanic rituals and modern books on a healthy lifestyle. Water can change state and increase energy circulation. Cleanse not only on the physical level. So, with noticeable psychological overheating, I go into the shower with my head at any time of the day. By the way, obsessive thoughts are washed away quite well there if suddenly something persistently bothers you, but you need to do completely different things. Water literally washes away emotions, ideas, fatigue, travel, vanity. A window appears to launch new modes within yourself during the current day, and not just expect recovery with a night's rest.
Off
Complete and total disconnection from business and the Internet. As a preventative measure, I try to carry out such a deload weekly on Sundays, but in a situation of exiting both a negatively and positively colored surge, it takes 2-3 days for complete renewal. During this period, everything is available besides the Internet and work - walking, going to the cinema, reading a book, meeting friends, talking about high things, but just do not return to the Internet under any circumstances. And here lies the catch. In a situation of complete shutdown, when you have freed yourself from the routine flow of affairs and thoughts, ideas suddenly begin to “fall in”, and, of course, precisely in the aspect that you have temporarily cut off. For the success of the practice, all this is postponed until the day when the information diet ends. If you start writing everything down and discussing it right in the process of your day Off, thinking that an innocent recording means nothing, the cleaning processes will stop, not being completed. You will again be caught up in the whirlpool of deeds and thoughts.
A bridge of 100 meters cannot be crossed by walking only 99
Art and nature
Art is the nature of a big city. This brilliant insight came to me one day from the lips of a friend: “When you can’t go out of town right now, you can go to a museum, it also renews and energizes you.” Eureka! Everyone knows the restorative powers of nature, but few people look at art from exactly this angle - it charges with energy, perfectly switches and gives a very tangible return of positive emotions. Since then, I have been going to museums not only because there is a “new exhibition”, but also for recovery purposes, when I need to improve my condition and recover from internal hurricanes of varying strength. Art is the nature of a big city.
Rug with needles
Like many good things in our lives, this miracle device came to me through a problem. I was solving problems with my back that appeared in my life after the stress of certain events. And I found the best relaxer in the world. That’s exactly what my “gadget” is called. This is a mat with steel needles, which, at first, you are very afraid to lie on, and then you don’t know how to stick it into yourself as hard as possible, because this is exactly what your body asks for - the maximum impact of the needles for complete relaxation. Blood flow to the back and neck, tangible physical warming, complete relaxation achieved in just 30 minutes - all this perfectly calms and literally frees you from situational emotions. The manufacturer recommends lying on the needles before going to bed, but from my own practice I can say that resting on them during the day noticeably reduces the intensity of events if something goes off scale for your psyche. You may ask, where can you get these needles on that tiny tropical island? It's simple - I take the mat with me, following the example of a yoga instructor from our team. Great help!
Silence
The most effective, most complex (because it is the most “subtle”) and, in my opinion, the most beautiful tool. Practice complete silence. It combines the Off day and your personal, to begin with physical, silence. I recently had the chance to talk to Vegetarian magazine, and this is how I described my approach in response to their question: “How to arrange a one-day reboot at home on a day off, if the vacation is still far away, and the person is already at the limit or “hit the ceiling” ? :
Take the asceticism of silence for this day: no talking, exchanging glances, books, the Internet, gadgets, music, letters, SMS. Stop the flow of incoming meanings and do not try to fix your ideas that will come at this moment - let your psyche “untie itself” at least a little. Make an agreement with your family or go to any country hotel, upon arrival telling the staff that you want to keep quiet. Such silence should be a practice in the full sense of the word, when you, having made a promise to yourself, honestly keep it. Be silent without expectations and demands, listen to the world. Take a walk, walk the streets, look at passers-by, at the trees, at the world around you. Take a piece of paper with you: “Sorry, I’m silent today,” if you need to show it to someone. And please free yourself from wanting results in this one day. Demanding a one-day practice to solve your problems or super-insight is like seeing a future husband in a man on the first date and showing him this in every possible way. He'll run away! One day is very, very little. Usually the minimum time for a silent retreat is seven days, but ten is more common. Don't expect miracles. Just be honest and keep quiet. With attention to the current moment that surrounds you. And see what it gets you.
♥
Olesya Vlasova
PS Friends! You can get acquainted with my personal collection of sources on the topic of physics and metaphysics of conscious changes (what I inspire myself and what I recommend to you) at this link. The result was 33 books, 23 articles, 10 websites, 9 films, 8 videos + some personal stuff.
How to recover from a dry voice? Treatment methods
Competent treatment tactics largely depend on the cause of aphonia. If aphonia occurs against the background of infectious diseases, the ENT doctor will prescribe antibacterial or antiviral drugs, anti-inflammatory and antiseptic agents; will prescribe gargles, inhalations, and physiotherapeutic procedures.
If the problem arose as a result of a long conversation, shouting, or due to the costs of the profession, a phoniatrist will help you recover. He will offer an effective treatment regimen and show you a number of exercises, the implementation of which will help you avoid similar problems in the future. Very often, professional singers resort to the services of a phoniatrist to recover. But a consultation would not be superfluous for those employees who are forced to talk for a long time and a lot in the course of their activities.
In other cases, you may need to consult related specialists - an endocrinologist, neurologist, oncologist, etc.
Regardless of what caused the aphonia, there are a number of general recommendations that must be followed in order to recover quickly:
- Have a day of silence when you speak to a minimum;
- don't whisper;
- drink more warm liquids (teas, compotes, fruit drinks);
- humidify the indoor air;
- adjust your diet: no hard, spicy or hot foods, carbonated drinks, alcoholic drinks and coffee;
- give up bad habits.
Aphonia requires mandatory treatment! Therefore, do not delay your visit to the otolaryngologist.
What are the risks of ARVI?
Any ARVI is an infection that is characterized by damage to the upper respiratory tract. It is traditionally believed that the cure period for colds and flu is 7 days. Moreover, a person often feels better within 3-4 days and stops receiving proper treatment. The prevalence of ARVI is such that almost every person experiences unpleasant symptoms at least once a year. For some, due to stronger immunity, these first symptoms pass quickly and almost unnoticed, while others literally fall into bed with a high fever, weakness and other delights.
Article on the topic Come on, cough! Is it possible to distinguish ARVI from lung cancer by cough?
Constant companions of ARVI are weakness, loss of appetite, deterioration in performance, etc. At the same time, as experts note, such negative phenomena often continue to torment even after the formal sick leave is closed. In Russia, it is traditionally believed that if a person does not have a high temperature, then all other symptoms - nasal congestion, cough, runny nose, etc. - can be easily tolerated on his feet.
However, everything is not so simple, doctors note, and you need to monitor yourself for some time after the illness. “General recommendations after a cold usually look like this. It is advised to use vitamin therapy to strengthen the immune system, and to take care of yourself when going outside: it is advisable to walk for no more than an hour during the first week after illness. Of course, immediately after an acute respiratory viral infection, you need to protect yourself from hypothermia, which means dressing for the weather. By the way, you also need to be wary of overheating. You should beware of overwork: you don’t need to immediately take on certain responsibilities in full at work. It is also not recommended to suddenly change the climate after an illness for 3 weeks,” says immunologist Anna Shulyaeva . All of the above is necessary so that the body does not fall into a stressful state.
Simple measures. How to prevent respiratory viruses Read more
Folk recipes
You can restore strength after illness with the help of folk remedies. Let's look at the most popular recipes:
- Garlic tincture. Mash the garlic cloves (40 g) and mix with 100 ml of alcohol. You can add mint leaves for an aromatic scent. Recommended intake: 2-3 times a day, 10 drops before meals.
- Onion drink. Peel and cut the onion, pour boiling water over it, let it brew and strain. It is recommended to drink immediately, as over time all the beneficial substances will be released from the drink.
- Oatmeal broth. Boil 1 cup of oatmeal in 1 liter of water until jelly-like. Then strain, add an equal amount of milk and 5 tablespoons of honey. Mix the mixture thoroughly. Recommendations for use: 50 ml up to 4 times a day. Duration – 2 months.
How to boost immunity after illness: rule three - pharmacy
You can help yourself regain your strength with the wonderful natural protein interferon. It is produced in us and fights viruses, and if it is not enough, the doctor will prescribe medications containing it. Drugs that support immunity have been tested for decades; only a competent doctor must select them.
Dietary supplements will also provide you with support. And here is a direct path to trusted stores that specialize in them. There you will find honey and balms, sea buckthorn, juniper and rosehip syrups, with pine nuts, golden root, resin, vitamins and other useful additives at a reasonable price.
There are also pills that are useful for children, and syrups that can already be drunk at the age of 2. Altai is a great country for medicinal herbs, minerals and plants!
Among the folk remedies, ginseng, aloe, echinacea, and eleutherococcus will help - they support and strengthen the immune system.
