Hi it's Elissa Weinzimmer founder of Voice Body Connection and I'm here today
to talk to you about steaming your voice because it's a really amazing thing to
do to lubricate your vocal cords now if I've talked to you about it or someone's
talked to you about it you may not know exactly what to do so I thought I would
talk you through all the steps this facial steamer that I have right here is
a Vicks brand and you can get any brand there's lots of different ones but what
you're basically going to do with most of them is fill it up with water
water from the tap is fine although if you want to use bottled water that's great
and then this little piece goes like this and locks in there and then this
piece goes on top and now I'm gonna plug that guy in and I'll let him start
working so here's the thing these steamers that you can buy at the store
maybe cost like thirty bucks or something like that
but you don't have to do this fancy thing but you can actually do something
more DIY so you could heat up water on the stove and the way you would do this
is boil some water this water is already boiling yep there it goes and take the pot
and I'll go ahead and scoot this guy over for a second and use the pot of
water so as you can see steam is coming up out of this and the way that I would
DIY my steaming situation is just to grab a towel and lean over and catch the
steam inside a towel now this is probably gonna cool down within a number
of minutes but I can breathe this for about you know 10-15 minutes and it's
gonna be really valuable so I can either do it this way with the pot or I could
use one of the more fancy things hold on please and I could steam by putting my face
into the sort of reservoir whatever the thing is so here's the deal with
steaming you want to do it about 10 to 15 minutes this guy the reservoir
runs out in about that amount of time so perfect and if you are wearing you
know if you're not wearing glasses basically you can also
read a book or watch TV while you do this you can multitask if you're having a vocal
situation where you're feeling fatigued where you're feeling dry where you have
a cold where you feel hoarse I would do this twice a day when you're sort of in
triage mode as I would call it and it's also a great thing to do once a day just
for general vocal health a couple things to say about the vocal cords just so you
understand exactly how this is working is that your vocal cords have three
basic layers they have the outer layer which has mucosa around it and that's
what this is really going to help with is lubricating the outer layer so the
vocal cords aren't sticking together so much so if there's excess mucus on them
it sort of breaks up that mucous a little bit so that outer layer is
really really benefits from the steaming and then there's a second layer which is
this really cool jelly-like substance and that really benefits from drinking
lots of water so that's still absolutely a top vocal health tip is to drink lots
of water and then of course the deepest layer of the vocal cords is the muscle
itself and that can benefit from just a little bit of gentle humming if you're
feeling vocally fatigued so after you did something like this you could just
go you can watch my humming video from how to warm up if you want to know more
about that so I really highly recommend that you steam especially during the
winter months which were in right now it's a really important and healthy
thing to do let me know if you have any questions and oh there is one more
important thing you have to say that I almost forgot especially this Vicks guy
sometimes comes with one of those little eucalyptus things or like a little
insert don't use it okay and don't use essential oils in general in your water
or for your steaming just because when it's going straight down your airway
it's actually just those molecules are a little too intense to really sit right
down on your vocal cords so while they're great to diffuse in the air in
your house I wouldn't highly recommend breathing them in a concentrated way in
your steam for a long period of time okay so let's ease up on the eucalyptus
and the menthol it's gonna actually dry us out and just have water okay I'm
pretty sure that's everything I wanted to say I hope
you enjoy and if you have any questions just let me know