Dude, who even knows.
Post reblogged from Slate Star Scratchpad with 163 notes
google: “why does phenibut make my voice sound beautiful?”
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 “clear and confident”, versus the squeak of a nerd begging someone for a date. I don’t 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 “beautiful voice” 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’t anxious in the shower. For that matter, I would have thought I wasn’t an anxious person in general. Yet here I am, singing in the shower much more beautifully than usual. Maybe “anxiety” isn’t even the right word here. Maybe it’s “tonic muscle contraction”, 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’s going well and I don’t feel anxious. And it’s 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’ve cleared up every anxiety-producing thing in my vicinity and am super-relaxed and everything is going well, I’ll 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 “anxiety” is too weak, and even people like me who don’t consciously feel anxious can have some excessive level of anxiety interfering with functioning. Goodness knows I have enough patients who are like “I hate everything and the world sucks and I think I’m a horrible person”, and then I ask “Have you considered you might have depression?” and no they had not considered it. Maybe I am like that. “I rarely leave my house and I hate social interaction and whenever I take anxiolytics my voice improves” “Have you considered you might have anxiety?” “Let’s not get carried away here.”