Ok this thread seems like a good place to share my thoughts on Xanax and stuttering. I am fairly new to Xanax but not new to stuttering. Brief background on my stuttering: I'm a 30 yr old, male, and have stuttered for as long as I can remember. My stuttering has always been blocks not repetitions and it has varied greatly according to the situation; it has always depended on how badly I did not want to stutter in the given situation. If I was approaching a girl or walking into a job interview I really wanted to not stutter which would result in me being almost unable to speak at all, experiences filled with high anxiety/panic. I tried speech therapy in my teens and when I was 21 I went to an intensive 3 week therapy course. The techniques were somewhat useful and I learned about the importance of controlling breathing and gained a better understanding of what went on in my vocal chords when I blocked up.. but I never felt like stuttering was something that I was going to overcome through practice repetitions. I have always been able to talk 100% fluent when alone or talking to a dog or a child, so when I practiced fluent speech on my own it did not feel productive, I already knew I could do it when I had nothing to lose. I feel stuttering is deeply part of my biological makeup and that muscle memory training or other acquired skills are not going to override that. I describe my stuttering as over-correcting in the form of rapid involuntarily thinking. I think about upcoming words in my sentence formulation that I am afraid of stuttering on and I do it quickly and unconsciously. It is the fear of stuttering on a word that paralyzes my mind in that split second that I turn the wheel sharply as the car veers off the road. In high anxiety situations I have never been able to avoid this thought pattern, the fear and anxiety just makes it more difficult to control my mind. I also have anxiety and indecision about which words to use to express myself, which may be completely unrelated to fear of actually stuttering but nonetheless contribute to the stuttering by consuming my thought processes. So I am thinking about what thought or message I am trying to communicate and which words to choose, and at the same time thinking about which words I am likely to block on and how I am going to get through each block. There's just a lot of going on in my head in these situations that feel out of my control. Anyways, about Xanax... I started experimenting with it over the summer and I have been trying to come up with an explanation for why I do not stutter when I am under the influence of this drug. The best I can do is: it seems to really slow me down in a way that the involuntary thought process of over correcting that I described above stops happening. I do not anticipate words, I do not fear the words, I am more decisive and confident in the words I choose, and my vocal fold muscles stay relaxed no matter what. A good friend of mine who stuttered as a kid would say to me "just don't try so hard." It really does seem to be all about trying too hard. The more I try, the more I stutter. When I am on Xanax I do not try too hard. It is literally the first and only true relief from stuttering that I have ever experienced in my life. I am aware of the risks of benzodiazepines, as far as their addictive nature, withdrawal effects, and the possible connection to an increase in risk of dementia in later life. This is not a drug that I think I would want to be on for a large portion of my waking hours. I still have a lot of research to do and questions to ask doctors, but at this time I look at it like a wonderful relief from my anxiety/stuttering even if only a few nights a week. Over the summer I have tried out different doses and frequencies, without a prescription yes but I have been very cautious. Drugs affect everyone differently and I have read a lot of scary things on the internet about Xanax, as far as the withdrawal from it being utter hell.. I am sure that's true if you take high doses for a long period of time. In my summer w/ Xanax the worst experience I had was one or two nights of very poor sleep following a 2 week period of taking it every day. After 3 or 4 months of taking it off and on I have concluded that any possible unpleasant feelings caused by intermittent cessation of reasonable doses is NOTHING compared to the unpleasant feelings of high anxiety/humiliation/panic that I have experienced about 20,000 times in my life. OK that's my long winded response to "anyone in /r/stutter tried Xanax?" lol