Your Throat Hurts When You Talk? 4 Causes of Muscle Tension Dysphonia (You Knew the Last One)

Your throat hurts when you talk — but where did this even start? Muscle Tension Dysphonia (MTD) doesn't happen in isolation. There's always a reason the muscles started bracing. In this video, I'm walking you through the 4 most common causes I see as a Speech Language Pathologist and Voice Therapist — and the last one might surprise you. We'll cover: → Cause #1: Post illness or post problem (and why you need a laryngologist with stroboscopy) → Cause #2: Vocal demand — singers, teachers, preachers, and professional voice users → Cause #3: Irritants — allergies and reflux (and why the vocal folds are sensitive but not smart) → Cause #4: Stress and anxiety — and the nervous system connection that ties it all together ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🕐 TIMESTAMPS ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 0:00 — Why MTD doesn't happen in isolation 0:18 — Cause #1: Post illness or post problem 1:09 — Cause #2: Vocal demand 2:11 — Cause #3: Irritants (allergies & reflux) 3:37 — Cause #4: Stress & anxiety 4:19 — How stress actually changes your voice (live demo) 4:38 — What's coming next + how to work with Abby ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔗 MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ↳ Nervous System & Voice (next video): Throat Tension From Stress?   • Muscle Tension Dysphonia and Stress: The N...   ↳ MTD Exercises The Exercises Your Voice Therapist Would Teach You    • Muscle Tension Dysphonia: The Exercises Yo...   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📅 WORK WITH ME ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ↳ Voice Reset session (MTD): coming soon! ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ I'm Abby Duke — Speech Language Pathologist, Voice Therapist, and mom to a child with ADHD. I use the science of voice to help parents, families, and voice users understand what's happening — and find new tools to work with it. 🎙️ Free your voice.