Does drinking coffee ruin your voice?
Hi everyone! One of the questions I get from my students quite a lot is this: ‘Does drinking coffee (or alcohol) ruin your voice?’. It’s important to care for your voice specially if you are a content creator (you use your voice in EVERY piece of content) or a performer (you are onstage either for long periods of time e.g. a musical or for more than three hours at a time e.g. a concert). The short answer is: IT DEPENDS. Let me break it down:
1. Both coffee and alcohol are classified as diuretics.
2. This means they can be dehydrating to your body (including your voice!) but …
3. Its effect depends on how healthy you are and how regularly you keep yourself hydrated. The healthier you are, the lesser the impact. The more you drink water, the less dehydrated you’ll be.
My advice to my students is this:
a. avoid both before a performance
b. drink in moderation
c. drink better alternatives. I recommend herbal tea (chamomile tea also helps relax your nerves) or ginger and honey (ginger combats inflammation and honey lubricates the throat)
Of course, you probably see in movies or in live performances that some artists drink coffee and/or alcohol during, before or after a performance and they will have their personal reasons for doing so but, if you want to keep your voice in tip-top shape, coffee and alcohol are big no-no’s.