The Dr. Is In: Every Voice Needs Sleep

Singers must take adequate sleep seriously as a part of their vocal health. Learn more about the importance of sleep for your general and vocal health in this article. 

Every brain and voice needs sleep, and understanding the signs and symptoms of sleep deprivation is vital for maintaining not just your wellness but also your voice. You read that right: getting too little sleep can be physically detrimental to vocal health. Fortunately, there are also some simple, straightforward, and affordable steps you can take that will optimize your sleep. 

If you are sitting at home reading Classical Singer and you find yourself nodding off, you may not be getting enough sleep. And if that’s the case, you wouldn’t be alone: nearly 70% of college students report getting inadequate sleep,1 along with 36.8% of adults in general.2 As a college student, I sometimes studied late into the night thinking that those few extra hours of bombarding my head with data was somehow going to be useful. The trouble was, it rarely worked, thanks in part to sleep deprivation.

Every night, for about 7–8 hours your brain needs a period of dynamic relaxation. After a taxing day of gathering data and making difficult decisions, it needs to clean house and organize clutter. During sleep, metabolic refuse is collected and cleared by the glymphatic system3 while information is processed and stored. That system mostly deactivates when we’re awake, so sleeping for at least 7 hours is how we keep our brain squeaky clean and fine-tuned!

Too Many Consequences from Not Enough Sleep

Let’s start with your metabolism. With the increased prevalence of both metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes, there has been a renewed interest regarding insulin resistance, because it causes both of those diseases. Insulin resistance is often attributed to overeating carbs or highly processed foods, and that is accurate. 

However, peripheral insulin resistance, primarily in skeletal muscles, is also caused by sleep deprivation!4 This is particularly concerning because resistance training involving skeletal muscle is often used to improve insulin sensitivity. If you want to improve your workouts, sleep more, not less! Once insulin resistance becomes severe, all sorts of things start breaking—from your head (hearing loss) to your feet (diabetic neuropathy), things fail over time that can permanently knock you off stage.

When the brain is tired, there are a number of ways that your thinking can be affected. These insidious effects start subtly, so much so that changes often go unnoticed by the person experiencing them. Musicians rely heavily on their memory, and inadequate sleep can lead directly to memory deficits that affect your ability to learn pieces. Sleepiness can also cause impaired attention, and if memory and attention are both impaired simultaneously, you have an out-of-focus opus that will bring disharmony to your practice sessions!

Singers are already at increased risk for depression and anxiety, thanks to the stressors of performing careers as mentioned in a previous article. Sleeping too little acts to magnify stressors while reducing your ability to cope and, voila, depression gets worse! The fatigued mind doesn’t stop there, either. Mood changes, lost executive function, and increased impulsivity all round out the list of ways sleep deprivation can make your life difficult from a behavioral perspective.5

And of course, sleep has effects on your voice. Have you woken up after a brief night’s sleep to find our voice is hoarse or froggy? Perhaps unsurprisingly, too little sleep has been linked with dysphonia, especially in men.6 Even short-term sleep deprivation can cause changes to voice quality including increased roughness, decreased brilliance, and lowered mean fundamental frequency.7 To the listener, the sleepy voice sounds tired—and can you imagine trying to sing clearly at the top end of your range while fighting against an unexpectedly low fundamental frequency? If you spend all night prepping for the next day’s juries, you are undercutting your potential!

Acoustic research has also shown that depriving yourself of sleep alters your vocal harmonic-to-noise ratio, your ability to enunciate vowels and consonants (known as prosody), and even spectral features—your voice’s fingerprint, what makes it unique.8 If you are tired and you think that you do not sound like yourself, you are correct! Adding work-related stress to the ensemble only adds more dissonance to this sleepy symphony.

Now, what can be done to optimize sleep? As mentioned above, adults need at least 7 hours minimum per night, and teens need 8–10 hours. If you regularly have difficulty either getting to sleep or staying asleep, you need to go to your doctor as this may have a biological cause that needs additional therapies like medications, cognitive behavioral therapy, etc., to assist with your sleep.

Sleep Hygiene

Although the effectiveness of sleep hygiene (essentially, keeping your sleep habitat clean) for treating primary insomnia is moderate, these are some choices that can give you the best chance at a good night’s rest:

Sleep schedule: Go to bed at the same time every night, even on weekends.

Bedroom: Use it for only two things: sleep and intimacy. No screens in here!

Temperature: Ideal ambient temperature for sleep is 65-680 F,9 though a broader range may be acceptable for you.

Blue Light: Primarily produced by electronic screens and sunlight-mimicking lightbulbs, it may cut your melatonin levels in half. Avoid screens 1–2 hours before bedtime, and use soft white (“warmer”) lightbulbs in your bedroom.

Stimulants: Caffeine has a half-life of 10 hours, so you might want to avoid it after lunch!

Ambient Noise: A fan or other “white” noise generator may be beneficial to your sleep environment.

Ambient Light: Use light-blocking curtains to prevent light from the outside keeping you awake or waking you too soon.

Exercise: Excellent for improving sleep; however, exercise may spike cortisol, which keeps you awake. Avoid strenuous forms at least 4 hours before bedtime. Evening Tai Chi or yoga actually helps you get to sleep!10

Treat yourself to a good night’s rest and not only will you preserve your health, but you will also preserve your voice. Sweet dreams!