I have been suffering from severe vocal chord issues for the last 1.5 years.
As someone whose whole life is centered around vocally expressing, I can assure you this has not been a fun experience. I’ve had months where I could barely speak a couple of words a day. Doctors pointed to stress and overuse (my job is a lot of talking) as the cause of this recurring issue. Ideally my brain would just hear this and go ‘Alright no more stress’.
But my brain, my conscious mind specifically or the part that I call ‘me’, felt so out of loop at this accusation. I could neither confirm nor deny the existence of stress in my body. Stress is not like a swelling that I can just feel around for. In fact I have found sadness or depression more identifiable than stress. I’m a generally happy, energetic person, right?
I could neither confirm nor deny the existence of stress in my body
Even more so, I have never thought about what my vocal chords actually feel like. Usually that whole area gets clumped together as, you know, the throat. What does it mean when my vocal chords are ‘stressed’? Which brings me to my point:
I am not the engineer of a lot of my bodily functions. I’m a product manager. What I mean is I know diddly squat about how vocal chords really work, and I have no voluntary control over the muscles in my voice box. I have no expertise in this field. BUT I know what end product the user wants. I want vocal muscles that don’t hurt.
My conscious mind has no expertise in this field. It is not an engineer, it is a PM
At the same time I am not just a customer of my subconscious either. I cannot want and whine and cry about my needs. I’ll explain what I mean in a bit.
So just like any PM, having some domain expertise is useful even if you’re not the one coding. So I starting paying more attention to what behavior my vocal chords are displaying. I would literally pause in the morning, mid-day whenever, to focus on what my throat feels like. I could tell apart some basic events like throat is dry, or inability to swallow, etc. This helped me segment issues that I could affect directly, like, I don’t want to have a dry throat. Easy to fix by drinking water or having a humidifier in the room.
Vs issues I couldn’t affect directly. One of those issues was ‘tension’ or ‘tensed muscles’. I always assumed tension was this abstract concept that you feel when you have a lot of uncomfortable feelings. A couple months ago, I realized what physically tensed muscles feel like. I realized it when I had just finished dancing, one of them intense choreographies, and no words would come out. My throat just didn’t want to produce a sound. I won’t bore you with the details here, but dealing with this was much more ambiguous.
Are my vocal chords tensed or am I tired? Or am I overeacting? Maybe I’m fixating?
And it happened more often too, I later realised, when I’m presenting in front of directors or when I’m having a difficult conversations. Again, to emphasize, I don’t have any direct control over my tensed muscles to get them to calm down. There’s always calm breathing, but my throat acting up also prevented me from taking deep breaths. People who experience panic attacks know this catch-22 all too well. A breakthrough in this situation was having my conscious mind be explicit about wanting to relax, or wanting to calm down. So I pictured it this way: as a PM I ask my engineers who do have the expertise.
Initially it felt like speaking in the void, or speaking to God, or manifesting, what have you. Felt quite stupid to just be explicitly wanting things without knowing how to affect them. My subconscious was a bunch of my engineers that I couldn’t see but I trusted them to be exceptionally skilled. So I did it over and over anyway. Just feeling the tensed muscles and internally, in English, expressing that they should feel more relaxed.
Just, in English, expressing what I thought my vocal chords should feel like
And it worked for me. It worked so much, especially, when I wasn’t being vague – I wasn’t whining for a shiny new product. I was giving design specs. When I wanted to be able to talk and sing and scream like I used to, it brought me despair and anger and anxiety. On the otherhand, when I started focusing on my throat, thinking how this should feel more relaxed. This should feel more calm, I felt like I could affect it in a matter of minutes. Again, I have benefitted a lot from imagining me, my conscious mind, as an Product Manager, rather than a customer of my subconscious. My needs have to be broken down into digestible design specs and fed to my subconscious for it to do what it does best – fix my body.
I wasn’t asking for a shiny new product. I was giving design specs.
Over the last few weeks I have been able to make some retroactive fixes when my throat is acting up. I’m paying attention to symptoms and actively investing my time understanding the part of my body that is flaring up. Simply closing my eyes, drowing out the distractions of TV, work, etc and just focusing on what my body is feeling, vs what it wants to feel. It has worked for me and helps me with consistently positive outlook of my own body. My body is not the problem, my body are the tired confused engineers trying to stop everything from collapsing. I gotta help.
Of course, the goal is to never have my throat act up again. But I’m going to need to some more user research before I can prioritise that on the 2022 roadmap, and you know PMs – we never commit unless we talk to our engineers 😉
Thoughts on the edge 