Ian Sidden

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Made it a Month with No Caffeine

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Coffeee_img451

I completed my month without caffeine, and it wasn’t too bad. Occasionally the thought would pop into my head “Coffee sounds good” or “Ooooh, look at that shiny Coke bottle”, but I managed to resist.

This last week, the opera scenes at NMSU went up, and I was tasked with conducting them at the last minute. I had a Coke the night of my first rehearsal with them. Yesterday, I bought my first bag of coffee. Truth be told, I really like coffee and soda. I’m a vegan, so I have the capability of letting go of certain foods, but gosh it would be hard to totally stop drinking caffeinated beverages.

That being said, I do plan to seriously lessen the amount of caffeine that I consume. These are my reasons:

  • I was using way too much at all points of the day.
  • The crashes did stop once I let it go.
  • The frequency of muscles aches declined.
  • My anxiety dropped considerably.
  • I saved money.

As for my singing, I didn’t notice too much of a difference. When I drink too much caffeine, I can sometimes feel a shortness of breath during very strenuous singing, but aside from that, I feel and sound the same using or not.

If anything helped me improve this last month, it was my regular yoga practice.

One Month with No Caffeine

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Coffeee_img(with x)

Beginning today (I wrote this on the 15th), I am taking an official month away from caffeine. No soda, no coffee, no tea, no Excedrin no Red Bull, no nadda.

During grad school, I developed a caffeine addiction. There is an easy-access soda vending machine in the NMSU Music Center. There is also a Starbucks nearby. I had a couple bucks a day to blow on caffeine. I had a high level of stress and a low level of sleep. I bought my first coffee maker. I gave up tea for coffee. By looking at my budgets, I can see that I have spent several hundred dollars on those vending machine Cokes. I sometimes had to wrestle with what beverage to drink first: the coffee that had cooled or the soda that I had just bought.

But Why Stop?

Here’s why:

  1. I HATE the crash.  It makes me useless for about an hour.
  2. It costs money. I have very little money.
  3. I feel anxious for no apparent reason.
  4. I want to see if it affects my singing.
  5. I have concerns for its affects on my long-term health and mental well being.

This is partially scientific. Do I still get drowsy in the middle of the day without morning coffee? Can I concentrate better without it? Can I focus on what I WANT to focus on instead of whatever minutiae attracts my attention? Am I a better singer with or without it?

Let’s find out.

Why Only A Month?

I’m a pragmatist, and I know that if I said “I’m never drinking caffeine again!” I would be back in line at Starbucks tomorrow. A month is easy for my brain to deal with, and maybe I will be stronger by the end of it.

Caffeine Withdrawal

Yesterday, I had an intense headache, backache, and neck ache all day long for no particular reason. I hydrated myself with more and more water. I ate. I stretched. I meditated. I focused on my atlanto-occipital joint. I did everything EXCEPT drink coffee or take Excedrin. The pain lasted through the night and today is mostly gone. This experience jives with my last caffeine withdrawal experience: pain, soreness, restlessness, fatigue. The last time it lasted for several days. It seems easier this time.

And so, here’s to a month of no morning coffee or glorious diet sodas that fix the crash caused by the morning coffee.

What about you? Do you find any relationship between caffeine use and your singing? Is it positive or negative?

Perform Fearlessly Part IV: The Day of the Performance

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Chill_out

By this point of preparation, you can do little to fundamentally change your outlook on the nature of a performance. So your best bet is to set up conditions so that you are in peak shape to perform even if you still have lingering worries.

    1. Get enough sleep the night before. Pavarotti said in Great Singers on Great Singing that on a typical performance day he would sleep in until noon. Rest!
    2. Eat enough….but not too much. It’s scary being so stuffed that you cannot breathe, but it’s equally frightening to be so famished that you have no strength. This will probably deserve its own post in the future, but you must learn what is best for your body and your voice when you eat. Before a performance, try eating a light meal a few hours in advance. Then bring fruit to the performance to refuel while you are taking breaks.
    3. Beware of Caffeine. In my most recent Weekly Gathering, I posted Coffee Breakdowns: Is There a Link Between Caffeine and Hallucinations? This quote is particularly ominous for the potentially worried performer:

Caffeine heightens the physiological effects of stress, lead author Simon Jones says. When someone feels anxiety, the body releases the hormone cortisol, and when people drink plenty of caffeine-infused tea, coffee or soda, their body produces more of the hormone when they encounter stressful events. Researchers have proposed that cortisol may trigger or exaggerate psychotic experiences by increasing the amount of the neurotransmitter dopamine flowing into the brain’s limbic areas, evolutionarily ancient regions involved in emotion, memory and behavior.

I tend to get fearful jitters if I drink a lot of caffeine before a show. It’s usually unnecessary, anyway. The material should be stimulating enough to keep you awake.

  1. Warm-up slowly. Noodle around with your voice and body throughout the day just to keep it moving. Then warm-up about a half-hour before the performance. Of course, your mileage may vary, so pay attention to the signals your body is giving out.
  2. Trust that you Know Your Material: If you prepared properly, your material is learned. Try to avoid singing it over and over because you’ll tire out your voice and your mind. If you must, just recite your words to yourself and remember your acting intentions.
  3. Relax and Focus: You must pamper yourself a bit on the day of a big performance. Rest, take relaxing walks, do very light exercise, meditate, eat refreshing meals, drink water, etc. Try to avoid moving heavy furniture on a performance day. Accept that certain things must be put on hold, and let them go.

Do you have your own ideas about how to stay relaxed on performance day? Do you agree that being relaxed on performance day is necessary? If you have any comments, please leave them below!

Weekly Gathering: July 10-17

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There were lots of good articles this past week! Perhaps there was some built up energy from the July 4 festivities.

Pianist and scholar Robert Levin speaks at Curtis Commencement on May 16, 2009. If you click on nothing here, you must listen to this if you are a classical musician. It takes about 15 minutes. It’s worth it. [It’s not from the time period specified in this post’s title, but it’s still great.]

Make Your Audition Pianist Happy by Billie Whittaker on her blog Good Company is an informative and funny article. It is specifically written for singers, so you should definitely check it out.

Sitting Quietly, Doing Something from the New York Times bog Happy Days is about the science of happiness. In particular, it is about a Buddhist monk who is demonstrably the happiest man in the world. Turns out that happiness is trainable. There’s also an embedded video that is very interesting.

I Don’t Know How they Do it by Jessica Duchen at Standpoint. This is an appreciative article about Joyce DiDonato who sang Rosina in Barber of Seville with a broken leg. It goes on to ask for pity for singers who cancel due to health concerns.

Coffee Breakdown: Is there a Link between Caffeine and Hallucinations? from Scientific American. As the name suggests, this article describes the effects that caffeine has on stress…and they aren’t good.

Music Review-‘Prima Donna’: The Diva has Issues from New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini is a gentle mixed review for the first full opera by Rufus Wainwright. I love Rufus’ music and would love to hear his opera.

Youtube: Where Customers Get the Last Word from Small Business Trends discusses the recent case of professional musician Dave Carroll whose guitar was badly damaged on a United Flight. He countered with some hard hitting songs on YouTube, and now United is listening. [By the way, if you are a voice teacher or singer, then you are a small business. This is a great blog to follow.]

And yet…You Tube Pulls Audio from Greatest Music Video Ever from CNET is about the audio track being pulled from the parody version of “You Make my Dreams” by Hall and Oates. It featured the “keyboard cat”. Weird. Read the comments too (in the article, those on YouTube are totally R rated in protest). Turns out audio tracks have been yanked from personal videos because a copyrighted song happened to be playing in the background.

The Capacity for Honesty from Once More With Feeling is a good “musing” on the difference between artists and performers as well as honesty and artifice as related to repertoire decisions.

Finding Ways to Communicate: Fitting Your Audience’s Style by Rachel Velarde has a lot of good social media tips.

Learning to Sing: Deciding When to Start from Finding my Singing Voice offers some excellent advice for teachers of young singers and their parents.