Before, I talked about listening to music and what it does for you. I mentioned some of the different genres if music, how music affects your mood, how I tend to listen to music every day, all that good stuff (least I hope it was good).
Now I’m going to talk about music again, but this time it’s about the music you make with your vocal chords; I’m talking about singing by the way, in case you didn’t get that.
Why do I bring this up? Well, after I finished writing the post about music that can help soothe your nerves, I started to wonder: can the same apply for singing? After all, singing is a part of music too. So I started to look into it, trying to find out if singing can work like music and calm you down. Just singing and nothing else. Well I did find some stuff about it, it wasn’t much, and most of what I found was in small parts of articles that talked about how music calms you down overall. But hey it’s better than nothing.
One article I read talks about something called vocal toning. It’s basically humming at a certain pitch until you feel your face vibrate. The vibrations are supposed to travel down to your heart and stomach as you continue to hum. Apparently it reduces the stress hormones (Adrenaline and Cortisol) in your body. I’ll leave a link to the article here.
When I first read this thing about vocal toning and how you have to vibrate your face to reduce stress, a picture of a vibrating phone popped in my head, only instead of draining the battery, vibrating drains the stress.
Another article I found talked more about singing to reduce stress, but again, it’s only a small part of the article and it kind of puts it as an add-on to listening to music. It starts with saying try singing with the music you are listening to as a kind of level up from just listening to music. It goes on to say that singing helps us to slow down and regulate our breathing thus making us relax more. It then asks you to try singing to yourself every now and then; you don’t have to sing to people and you don’t have to worry about being a good singer either, just try singing. Personally I agree with this article. This isn’t about impressing anyone, it’s about getting yourself to relax and unwind. Besides, as the article says, trying to sing to impress other people is a stressor by itself and you don’t need to deal with that. I’ll leave a link to the article here.
So there you go, just like listening to music, making your own music with your voice is just as good as listening to music. To quote the song by Will.I.Am and Britney Spears, go ahead and, “scream and shout and let it all out,” unless there are other people nearby, then you should be considerate and sing softly!
Alternative Yoga 