When the Voice Goes Silent

What a panic attack taught me about singers, the vagus nerve, and a very silly sound

It happened after a performance.

The kind of moment that should feel like relief — the lights down, the audience gone, the pressure lifted. But for the young performer in front of me, the end of the show wasn't a release. It was the moment everything they'd been holding together finally broke open.

They'd felt unsupported by their teachers. That particular kind of wound — not being seen by the people whose job it is to see you — has a way of waiting until you're alone to arrive fully. And it arrived.

First came the tears. Then the breathing changed: fast, shallow, the chest working hard but getting nowhere. Then their eyes went somewhere else. Not to the ceiling, not to the floor — somewhere unreachable, that glassy distance that tells you a person is no longer quite in the room with you. They couldn't feel their body. And when I asked them to try something, they couldn't make a sound at all.

Their voice was completely gone.

As a voice teacher with a certification in Alexander Technique and training in Betsy Polatin's trauma work, I've learned to read the nervous system the way a doctor reads a chart. And what I was reading in that moment was urgent. They were moving from upset into overwhelm — and I could feel the window closing. If I didn't find a way to slow the trauma response down, they were going to go somewhere much harder to reach: a full freeze. The kind of shutdown where the body simply stops, where no amount of reassurance penetrates.

I had a short window. Maybe.

The tool I reached for was something I'd only recently been trained in: a technique drawn from polyvagal theory, rooted in the work of Betsy Polatin — whose approach she describes as a synthesis of different trauma modalities, which she calls Alexander's Discoveries and Trauma — a framework for understanding how the nervous system governs not just our emotions, but our physical capacity to breathe, speak, and move. The exercise itself is simply referred to as "Voo". You inhale, and on the exhale you make a long, low voooooo sound — like a foghorn, or a very contemplative cow mooing. When I first encountered it in training, I'll admit I thought it was a little absurd.

But here's what I remembered: I had felt it work. During that same training, I'd found myself in a trauma response of my own — the body doesn't discriminate just because you're there to learn — and when we did the "Voo" as a group while I was trapped in an old somatic memory, I felt something in me settle. Not through understanding it, but through experiencing it. My nervous system had calmed. The breath had deepened. The vibrating sound had done something that no amount of thinking about the sound could have done. It brought me to a state of “Okay enough”.

I wasn't sure it would work for them. I wasn't sure of anything. But I trusted my training, and I tried.

The vagus nerve — the longest cranial nerve in the body — runs from the brainstem through the heart, lungs, diaphragm, and gut. It's the primary channel of the autonomic nervous system, and when it perceives a threat (real or imagined, physical or emotional), it responds. The diaphragm tightens. The larynx constricts. The pharynx changes shape. All of it happens beneath conscious awareness, all of it in the name of survival.

For a singer, this is catastrophic — because singing requires exactly the things the vagal response takes away. The open throat. The free breath. The mobile diaphragm. The connected, resonant voice.

What makes the "Voo" remarkable is that it speaks the nervous system's own language. A sustained, voiced tone — especially a low one — stimulates the vagus nerve directly through vibration. It's the same mechanism behind why humming feels soothing, why chanting works, why a lullaby can slow a child's heart rate. You're not reasoning your way out of a trauma response. You're vibrating your way out of one.

At first, they couldn't do it.

We sat with that. There's no rushing a nervous system that has decided the world isn't safe. We waited — not in silence exactly, but in the kind of slow, present company that itself begins to signal: you are not in danger here.  

I used my hands to provide a physical connection back to their body - to stimulate awareness and a pathway back to the present moment.  I suggested finding colors in the room, and helping them orient themselves in the present.

It took awhile, but gradually, something shifted. The eyes came back. The breath found a little more room. And then we tried the Voo again, and tentatively — a sound emerged.

It was short. High-pitched. More of a squeak than a foghorn. But it was there.

If you know anything about the voice, you know what a high pitch is created when the vocal folds are pulled into a stretched, thin configuration.  When the muscles around the larynx are gripping, the vocal folds struggle to create sound at all. Holding on, the way the whole body holds on when it's braced for impact will result in a short, high, tight "voo". This is a nervous system still on alert.

But making the sound at all begins to change things. So we kept going. Breath by breath. Voooooo.

Slowly, the pitch dropped — not because I asked them to lower it, but because tension releases when it no longer has to be held. The breath started to sustain the sound instead of cutting it off. The "voos" grew longer, rounder, fuller. And then something I didn't expect: they laughed. At the absurdity of the sound, at the ridiculousness of two people making foghorn noises together. And laughter — real laughter — is one of the most vagal things a human body can do.

They were back. Present, breathing, grounded. Voice restored.

It was only afterward, once the episode had resolved itself, that the full significance of what had happened settled in for me.

I'd been so focused on getting them through the immediate crisis that I hadn't yet connected it to the broader picture of what voice teachers work with every day. But standing there, I recognized something: this same process — this deliberate act of using the voice to regulate the vagal complex — could work before a performance, too. Not just as rescue, but as preparation. A way to keep a performer from entering a heightened state in the first place. Or to bring them back from one mid-performance, in the wings between scenes, in the breath before a phrase.

I've thought about that moment many times since, especially when working with singers who tell me a version of the same story: I sound so much better at home. I can't replicate what I do in rehearsal when I'm actually performing. Something just shuts down.

They usually say this with a particular kind of shame, as if it's a failure of willpower or talent. As if caring too much is the problem.

But what I witnessed — and what I've seen many times since — isn't a failure of artistry. It's a nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do. The subconscious registers the stakes: the teacher watching, the audience waiting, the need to be good. And something below the level of thought interprets that as danger. The vagal complex responds. The breath tightens. The throat closes. The voice that flowed so freely in the living room is suddenly nowhere to be found.

And the singer doesn't think: my vagus nerve is activated. They think: I'm a bad singer.

The "Voo" doesn't resolve the underlying wound — that takes longer, and other kinds of work. But it does something immediate and concrete: it reestablishes the connection between voice, breath, and body. It meets the nervous system in its own language, which is not words or willpower, but sensation. Vibration. Sound.

It says, in the most direct way possible: your voice is still here. Your breath is still here. You are still here.

Sometimes that's exactly what someone needs to hear — not in words, but in a long, low, ridiculous, beautiful voooooo.