"}google: \u201cwhy does phenibut make my voice sound beautiful?\u201d
This is a well-recognized phenomenon, not just something I imagine. The plausible explanation is that phenibut is an anti-anxiety drug, and anxiety makes your voice worse. Think of the person whose voice is praised as \u201cclear and confident\u201d, versus the squeak of a nerd begging someone for a date. I don\u2019t think most other anti-anxiety drugs help with this, but phenibut is better than most, plus they all work in different ways and on different facets of anxiety.
This segues into an evolutionary explanation. Anxiety naturally causes tension in muscles controlling the vocal cords the same as it causes tension in any other muscle. Our concept of a \u201cbeautiful voice\u201d is the sort of voice that a confident high-status carefree person with no tension in their vocal muscles is likely to produce.
The problem is, phenibut makes my voice sound better when I sing in the shower. I would have thought I wasn\u2019t anxious in the shower. For that matter, I would have thought I wasn\u2019t an anxious person in general. Yet here I am, singing in the shower much more beautifully than usual. Maybe \u201canxiety\u201d isn\u2019t even the right word here. Maybe it\u2019s \u201ctonic muscle contraction\u201d, which when it gets past a certain point, becomes perceptible as anxiety.
Somehow this makes me really melancholy, in a Flowers For Algernon sort of way. I guess I have some level of tonic anxiety all the time, even when everything\u2019s going well and I don\u2019t feel anxious. And it\u2019s preventing me from reaching my potential - at least vocally, and who knows how many other ways? Some other people probably have lower tonic levels of anxiety, but even when I\u2019ve cleared up every anxiety-producing thing in my vicinity and am super-relaxed and everything is going well, I\u2019ll never have the kind of voice they do. And taking phenibut too often is a really, amazingly, abysmally bad idea.
Or maybe the concept of \u201canxiety\u201d is too weak, and even people like me who don\u2019t consciously feel anxious can have some excessive level of anxiety interfering with functioning. Goodness knows I have enough patients who are like \u201cI hate everything and the world sucks and I think I\u2019m a horrible person\u201d, and then I ask \u201cHave you considered you might have depression?\u201d and no they had not considered it. Maybe I am like that. \u201cI rarely leave my house and I hate social interaction and whenever I take anxiolytics my voice improves\u201d \u201cHave you considered you might have anxiety?\u201d \u201cLet\u2019s not get carried away here.\u201d