Topics: Losing Your Voice, Muscular Tension Dysphonia, Vocal Health, Stress in The Body

Losing your voice…for weeks, then months. (A MTD story)

In this deeply personal solo episode, I share my one year update on a journey through muscular tension dysphonia, a condition that silenced me (yes, completely!) and forced me to face stress, identity, and balance in a whole new way.

This is not just a story about losing your voice — it’s about what happens when your body finally says: Enough.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re carrying too much — stress in your body, fear in your mind, or the weight of “what if I never get better?” — this episode is for you.

Here’s what we explore:

• The surprising mind-body link between stress and your voice — and what it taught me about listening to my body before it shouts.
• Why ‘finding your voice’ isn’t just a metaphor — it’s a daily, physical reality, and how I learned to nurture it back.
• Lessons from stillness: How losing my voice forced me to rethink success, slow down, and separate my worth from my work.

Leave this episode with new ways to manage stress, protect your health, and rethink what it means to truly listen to your body.
🎧 Listen or share this with a friend who’s navigating any kind of silent struggle right now. They’ll feel less alone.

CHAPTERS
00:00 When Your Voice Disappears: The Start of My Story
02:00 The Diagnosis No One Could Explain
11:00 What Finally Helped: Tools for Healing and Hope
14:30 Stress, The Body & The Voice: Understanding the Deeper Connection
17:00 Finding Meaning in the Silence: Lessons on Recovery

LISTEN TO NEXT
Episode 270: Going Silent

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MORE ABOUT THIS SELF-HEALING PODCAST EPISODE

“My body has now made the connection between stress and the tension in my throat.”- Chardét Ryel

• My journey with muscular tension dysphonia and what it taught me about stress and healing
• Practical vocal care tips and stress management tools
• How to support friends navigating invisible illnesses
• When slowing down isn’t failure — it’s survival

Have you ever felt like your body was trying to tell you something — but you were too busy, too caught up in the rush of life, to really hear it?
What if, one day, your body decided to turn up the volume in the most unexpected way… by taking your voice away completely?

That’s exactly what happened to me.

And no, I’m not speaking metaphorically. I’m talking about actually losing my voice from stress. A condition called muscular tension dysphonia — one I had never heard of before it turned my life upside down.

But this story isn’t just about my vocal cords.

It’s about what happens when stress builds quietly under the surface, when we tie our identity too closely to our work, and what it really takes to heal — from the inside out.

The Diagnosis No One Saw Coming – Losing My Voice

For months, my voice dwindled to a whisper. Speaking felt like trying to walk on a badly sprained ankle — every word, a sharp pain.
Doctors were stumped. Scans were clear. No physical damage. But I could feel it in every fibre of my being.

“Nobody knew what was wrong with me. There were no physical symptoms they could see, but I could feel it.”

Finally, I found an answer: muscular tension dysphonia. It was both a relief and a revelation.
Relief, because I had a name for what was happening. And revelation, because it forced me to look deeper at what my body had been trying to say all along.

If you’ve ever wondered how to manage anxiety when it feels like it’s living in your very muscles, you’re not alone.
Stress doesn’t just stay in our heads. Sometimes, it settles right into our throats.

Silent Days, Loud Lessons (the mind-body connection)

Losing your voice from stress is something you never expect until it happens.
I went from coaching clients and podcasting weekly to complete silence. Simple tasks became complicated. I relied on apps to communicate. In shops, I scribbled messages on paper like a tourist lost in translation.

“My job is in my voice. I’m a podcaster. I coach people with my voice. And at this point, I had to stop any client-facing interactions at all.”

It was isolating. It was frustrating. But strangely, it also created space.
Space to reflect. Space to ask deeper questions about my worth and my identity outside of my work.

When we lose a part of ourselves — our voice, our energy, our certainty — we’re forced to meet ourselves at a deeper level.

One of the biggest insights I gained through this experience is just how powerful the mind-body connection really is.
Stress isn’t some invisible monster lurking only in your mind. It’s physical. Tangible. And it has a direct line to your vocal health.

“If you’re struggling to find your voice, to say your truth, that tension lives in your gut — and it travels to your throat.”

The more pressure I put on myself, the tighter my throat felt.
The more I obsessed over recovery timelines, the more elusive healing became.

Sound familiar? If you’ve ever felt your chest tighten, your stomach knot, or your voice tremble under pressure, you’ve felt this connection too.

Learning how to manage anxiety became essential — not just to find calm mentally, but to actually allow my body to begin healing.

Small Tools, Big Shifts for Vocal Health

Recovery didn’t come from one magic pill or miracle cure. It came from small, daily choices. Choices that anyone — whether you’ve lost your voice or are just feeling the weight of everyday stress — can start making.

Things like vocal exercises, steaming, staying endlessly hydrated (seriously, your water bottle is your new best friend), and even sleeping with a humidifier to protect my vocal health.

“The more I did the vocal exercises, the more it got better.”

But just as important as the physical tools were the mindset shifts.
I had to separate my personal happiness from my professional performance. Untangle my self-worth from my productivity. Allow myself to pause — and truly rest.

“I had tied my performance in my business to my personal happiness — and that’s always a dangerous thing to do.”

Whether or not you’ve experienced muscular tension dysphonia, these lessons apply to all of us. Because stress, when left unchecked, finds its way into our bodies in the most surprising places.

Are You Listening to Your Body’s Signals?

If there’s one thing I want you to take away from my story, it’s this: Your body is always communicating with you.

Maybe it’s not your voice. Maybe it’s headaches, tightness in your chest, or that nagging exhaustion that coffee can’t fix. Whatever it is, I promise you — it’s worth paying attention to before it forces you to stop.

And if you’re already there, if your body has already hit pause, know this: You are not alone. Recovery is possible, even if it’s not as quick or linear as you hoped.

My journey with losing my voice from stress isn’t over. But it’s no longer a source of fear — it’s a teacher. One that reminds me daily to slow down, breathe, and choose healing over hustle.

🎧 Want the full story?

There’s so much more I share in the podcast episode — the emotional rollercoaster, the exact tools I used to heal, and the surprising ways this experience reshaped my life.

Listen now and let’s navigate this healing journey together. 💛

Transcript on Losing Your Voice – Muscular Tension Dysphonia

Chardet Ryel (00:00.329)
What’s it like when you lose your voice for months and you don’t know if you’re ever going to get it back again?

So this is what happened to me a year ago. I was diagnosed with muscular tension dysphonia. I go into a lot more about what that was like in the episode that happened a year ago. It’s episode 270 going silent. If you haven’t listened to that one or it’s been a while, I would listen to that first. For those of you who are struggling with muscular tension dysphonia and you feel like, don’t know if I can sing again, if I can talk again, I feel so stressed. This is to help you feel a little bit better.

And for those of you that have no idea what that is, aren’t struggling with it, this could be an interesting episode just on the idea of how we really relate to our bodies and how we regulate stress. I’ll see you inside.

Chardet Ryel (00:58.222)
Get ready to feel good naked. I’m your host, Chardét, and if you’re here right now, it means that you are ready to strip away all the crap, all the rules holding you back from feeling good in your body, in your mind, and in your life.

Chardet Ryel (01:14.51)
A little over a year ago, I started January, 2024 with my voice gradually declining. And I noticed that I couldn’t speak above about here. It was very hard for me to do this without pain. I thought it was just my voice was tired. So I didn’t do anything about it. Then I got laryngitis. Don’t know if it was viral or bacterial or what it was. I was traveling. So I was in Mexico at the time and I was recommended to take

a steroid injection to treat the inflammation. And I was recommended this not once, but twice. It was one of the biggest mistakes I made. Talk about that later. But anyway, the condition was getting worse and worse. And at one point it got to be a whole three months where I just wasn’t speaking because it was so painful. It’s like if you sprain a knee or you fall and every time you try to walk on it, it’s just incredibly excruciating pain. And that’s what it was.

like for me. And so I had to completely shift my life and shift it in some interesting ways. Some positive ones, some not so positive. But above all, it really made me appreciate how I think about work and life and stress in ways that I never had done before. And you can imagine what this was like, you know, around friends and family, fine, I would just type things. I had this voice app.

where I would write what I wanted to say and I could just play with the voices. I tried to have as much fun with it as I could, but that was how I got on without a voice at that time. And then when I went to the store, I didn’t want to give them some creepy AI voice. So I would just kind of write down what I needed and I would just show them. This was especially interesting because at one point we were traveling and I actually had to write this stuff in different languages to ask for things.

People were really generous and sweet and kind. So I’ll say that for humanity. They really helped me out. But it was also a really scary time because at that point I didn’t know what it was. And my job is in my voice. I’m a podcaster. I help people, coach people with my voice. And at this point I kind of had to stop any client facing interactions at all.

Chardet Ryel (03:36.215)
I also was still running my fitness business on the side. I had to completely stop that. And I was creating a new podcast at this time, which was launching. And I was kind of just crossing my fingers that by the time the episodes I already recorded end, when I don’t have any more, I hope, I hope, I hope that I can speak again. And that was just kind of where I was at. And I remember the breakdown moment for me was

when I finally went to some doctors in the UK who were specialists and they did a vocal scan and they said, your throat is actually healthy. We can’t see anything anymore. They did an MRI because they were worried it might be throat cancer and nothing showed up there. And so was at this point where nobody knew what was wrong with me. There were no physical symptoms that they could see, but I could

feel it. And I just remember having a breakdown so bad and just crying and crying. And I really appreciate my mother-in-law at the time I was at their home and she was so helpful through this, know, just comforting me through. And I remember sitting at the table with her, me with my little AI voice, and her talking to me and saying that I really need this to heal. I need this to heal. And then next few weeks, I’ve got stuff to do, things to launch. And she told me,

If it takes six months, it takes six months. And I remember thinking, if this takes six months, I won’t survive it. It took a year. I still have this condition. I don’t know if it’s something that will ever really go away, to be honest, because my body has now made the connection between stress, physical or psychological, and the tension in my throat.

So basically what I had is muscular tension dysphonia, and that is a heightened muscular tension in your voice box or the surrounding muscles. It can get progressively worse with different conditions. So if I’m in a very dry area with no humidity, it gets worse. If I’m on a plane, for example, if I talk for long periods of time and I’m not very careful about how much water I have, et cetera, it gets worse. So it just becomes kind of this condition that you live with.

Chardet Ryel (05:57.603)
But I want to give hope to people here because it’s a fraction of how bad it was when I was first diagnosed. It’s like, imagine you hurt your knee and you can’t really walk and then you get a surgery and then you’re fine. It’s not to what it was before. And you always have to be mindful of that knee, but you can function. That’s where I’m at now.

And I’ll go over a little bit later in the episode, things I’m doing for vocal health, things that helped me, because I know some of you are here because you are experiencing the same exact problem. I believe this is true for any sort of undiagnosable illness or disease or something that people especially can’t see, that you experience a lot of frustration. You feel also really upset and hurt because you kind of learn who your friends are.

who the people who care about you are, who checks in on you, who doesn’t. I’m not saying this in any judgmental sort of way because I have been the friend that did not check in. And it actually makes me feel very bad having now physically experienced what that’s like. So please, if your friends have anything, please just ask them, even if they’ve had it for months or years, just ask them how they’re doing. They will really appreciate you doing that.

It was a little bit isolating, right? I’m not doing anything social. I can’t really work. Anything that involves my voice anyhow, I can do a lot of writing. So I did a lot of that. And I had to get comfortable with kind of stillness and quiet. Only really saying the things that really mattered. So my husband and I, we didn’t have as many discussions.

because it wasn’t worth me writing it out in the little AI voice. I also at this time had to really look at what does it mean if I don’t have my voice. Me who has always been a storyteller, a communicator, a connector with my voice. I’m a podcaster, yes, but it’s even deeper than that. I’ve always loved to connect with people through my voice. And if I don’t have that, who am I? What do I do?

Chardet Ryel (08:11.757)
That was terrifying to think about, but it did make me realize that there’s always an alternative to way to do something. So if you’re in your life right now and you’ve lost something important to you or something you really value has been challenged and you don’t understand how you could possibly do it differently, you can sit with it and you can. When you let go of the, my God, this is happening to me. Then you start to see other ways.

around this. And so for example, for this podcast, I didn’t have any pre-recorded content. So I had to really look at, what episodes can we re-release that people really loved? That turned out to be okay. It also gave me time to really plan with how I wanted this show to evolve. Time to brainstorm instead of always doing. Though I know there’s this anxiety of will I get better?

And that is the hardest thing. If you’re sick with anything, especially when you don’t know what’s going on, like the idea of will I get better? It’s so hard when you’re in that situation of will I get better? And you just don’t know. Like there’s a lot of uncertainty and you can, only thing you can do is just keep on doing what is possible for you. After three months of being quiet, I finally was able to meet with a speech therapist.

And she said that, know exactly what you have. You have muscular tension dysphonia. Knowing what you have is like half the recovery because you don’t feel like it’s this mysterious illness anymore. This mysterious thing you can’t handle. You feel like, okay, now I can find answers. And she said, in fact, you actually have been hurting your voice by not speaking.

Because it’s kind of that thing when you, for example, hurt a muscle and if you’ve rested it for long enough, you need to use it or it starts to get stiff. Same thing with your vocal muscles. By not speaking, I was unintentionally making this condition even harder than it needed to be. Now, of course, in the beginning, when I had laryngitis, you rest your voice, but there’s a time when you need to start doing vocal exercises. You need to relearn how you breathe. It’s a lot of shifting.

Chardet Ryel (10:31.149)
And the more I did that, the more it got better. And so I started with things like, you know, vocal exercises, humming through a straw and a bit of water each morning, learning to breathe and speak more from the diaphragm, connecting the body. This is still something that I’m really struggling with. Not holding so much tension in my throat. When I get stressed from work, walking away, taking a moment,

and really separating myself from stress. So I think if anything, this whole experience has shown me that I had put far too much pressure on myself and I wasn’t separating the performance in my business with my personal happiness and fulfillment. I was tying the two together, which is always a very dangerous thing to do. And that experience has really led me to be like, we’re gonna separate. You are gonna be…

As much as you can be an objective person watching your career, watching your business, being proactive, but not being obsessed and attached to the outcome. Bigger lesson here, if you think about it, is not being attached to outcomes. So I did these vocal exercises, things like yawning. Yawning is very healthy, by the way, for anyone in any sort of situation where you use your voice a lot.

I hydrated all the time, so much more water than I was used to. I slept with a humidifier. This is something I still do to this day because it kept the air nice and humid. Make sure it’s clean, okay? A dirty humidifier is not doing you any favors. And I reduced how much I spoke. So if I was speaking for a long time like right now, I would then take, you know, half hour to an hour to not speak.

I would take the mornings and the evenings an hour each to not speak. That I don’t do as much anymore, but I definitely do still do the humidifier. I was steaming four times a day, sometimes more. Now I do it once unless I’m speaking a lot. Those things helped and they continue to help. And so it’s a combination of internal health, things like what you’re eating, even watching for inflammatory foods.

Chardet Ryel (12:46.705)
watching for this also I stopped drinking by the way at that point, hydrating and then all this is healthy for you no matter what even if you don’t have a vocal condition but if you do you use your voice a lot you want to be doing this stuff regularly and then the maintenance stuff of treating the symptoms things like the vocal drills breathing and even just relearning how to speak in many ways understanding when to take pauses understanding that the breath comes from here

rather than from the chest or from the throat. And what is really fascinating for me, the more that I learned about this, is the connection between your throat and your gut. Gut, they always say, is the second brain. has all of these different nerves in it. It’s where we feel our source of anxiety. It’s where we feel intuitively what to do next. There’s a lot of wisdom in our gut and the throat is intimately connected to it.

to the point where they are developing when you are in utero at the same time. From a psychological point of view, if you are really stressed, if you are struggling to find your voice, if you are struggling to say your truth, if you are hiding something that you need to express, that tension lives in your gut. It also goes to your throat.

The throat chakra is a very real thing, no matter what you want to call it. Stress that you feel can live here. And I made a habit of holding it there. And so again, it’s not something if I know will ever go away, like be there forever. But it has been really helpful in some ways because it’s like a signal for me. If I feel it getting tight, I know that stress is coming on hard for me.

Because before I would just kind of soak the stress up in my body and I would recognize it because I wasn’t sleeping well. I was losing hair. I had nails which were a little bit thinner and falling off a bit. But I wouldn’t really recognize it immediately in the same way. Now I do. Now it says, okay, it is time for you to dial back and pause and you have to. Because otherwise your voice is gone.

Chardet Ryel (15:05.491)
It also was really interesting to me because it highlighted not just how much my voice means to me, but how much I recognize that power in other people and something that I want to do. I mean, this has always been my work has been how do I help people step into their self-esteem before it was fitness, now it’s with visibility and even beyond that is their voice.

How do I help people express what is most inside of them, the things they most want to create in this world, the identity they most want to have? It is so powerful when you allow yourself to do that. And I can feel even now when I follow kind of my gut about different intuitive projects I want to do or collabs I want to have or even people to reach out to, it’s like I can feel a physical easing in my throat.

And I’ve learned to not hold in as well certain things that are really bothering me and stressing me out in any relationship I have. Obviously being tactful about it, but I don’t hold that stuff in anymore because it caused me to lose my voice. To this day, no one can say exactly what.

why this happened. They know what the condition is and what it was, but they don’t know why it happened. Was it initially a virus? Was it a bacteria? Either way, whatever it was, it did progress undoubtedly because of stress, because of anxiety. And I saw that even in the moment that I found out what condition I had when I was in the speech therapist’s office, I could feel the tension half.

immediately like this when she said this is what you have tension went down by 50 % because immediately the stress of not knowing what I was struggling with when it was going to be over how bad it was was gone and it’s a reminder of how bad we make stressful situations by obsessing about them by thinking of the worst case scenario any condition you have it is exacerbated

Chardet Ryel (17:20.971)
when you go into doomsday thinking, when you go into super stress, when you go into anxiety, it just gets worse. And so having these tools to really bring you back to calm, continue to keep you healthy are so essential. And so now whenever there’s something that I’m experiencing a symptom, headache, don’t know, dry mouth, anything like that, I always think about exploring and solving the root cause.

rather than just the symptom. Because I can see how powerful that has been from my voice. I can see that, yes, the steaming and the humidifier and the vocal drills, all this help, all of this stuff helps with the symptoms and the recovery. Fundamentally, what made the difference is how I manage stress. So if you are in a situation right now where you are very stressed out, whether you are experiencing physical symptoms or not,

find a way to manage it now before your body forces you to. Because when your body forces you to, it is not an immediate recovery. It’s not a, let me remove the source of stress. It was my job, let me quit. It doesn’t just go away like that. It means that you’re going to have a little bit more time to recover. And so if you can preemptively say, let me just handle this now, you won’t put yourself through this. I used to think about

how hard things must be for people with chronic illness. And I still, obviously that’s the case, right? Things are still hard. I, even though this was a chronic condition, it’s not the same level of a bigger disability. You see how adaptable we are. The power of the human body and the human mind and the human condition to adapt to your situation. If you think I could never do this, you’re wrong.

You could, you would find a way. Because you have to. Because the option is that or give up. Truthfully, there were moments in this situation with my voice where I wanted to give up. I really was just thinking, well, maybe it’s just going to be the situation that I never speak again. But then always coming back to, let’s see what we can do. Let’s find the answers. Let’s slowly manage what is possible.

Chardet Ryel (19:46.199)
and that has made the difference. So now I can say a year later after losing my voice, have I healed the condition fully? No, I’ve healed it maybe 80%. It might take another year to get to 100. That’s okay because now I have the knowledge and the tools to manage it. So similarly, if you’re feeling lost with something you’re experiencing,

Just getting some answers, just getting some tools, even just hearing from other people who are struggling with it. I think also for me, going on YouTube and seeing that there were tons of people experiencing this changed the whole situation for me. This is a big motivator for why I’m doing this episode. That you know you are not alone. Someone else is also going through this too.

Thank you so much for listening. you know anyone who is experiencing a chronic condition like this, please share this episode with them. I guarantee they will feel extremely grateful for it. So please share, let them know that they aren’t alone and give your friends a call who are struggling with anything. Even if you heard about it weeks, months ago, they want to hear from you. I’ll see you in the next one.

Follow Feel Good Naked in your favorite listening app. And if you’ve enjoyed the lessons that you have found here, check out my book, Seven Steps to Feel Good Naked, Health and Body Confidence Without Dieting. I guide you through how to create gentle nutrition, movement that works for you, self-care you can do even when you’re busy. This is how you make a roadmap to health without all the struggle.

You can find a link to the book in the show notes, or you can go to feelgoodnaked.com, Naked Without the E.