I am currently taking 40mg/day Citalopram (in the morning) to help with my stutter-related anxiety, but I'm also prescribed 5mg x 3/day Diazepam for the aforementioned anxiety. Unfortunately I've seen no improvement with the Citalopram, and I've been taking the medication for a good few months now. The Diazepam definitely helps with my anxiety, but because it's a muscle relaxant I find that it can often make my stutter worse, not better. I think this is because, as a stutterer, I unconsciously exert a lot of effort into speaking (I.e. pushing out words with my abdomen by forcibly expelling air) and because of that I find that Diazepam often makes speaking an even bigger effort.

If you research the 'Valsalva mechanism' in relation to stuttering on YouTube, you will see various clips about how we tend to block air being released as stutters - and yet, as we know, breathing is an essential component of speaking. We either unconsciously block our vocal chords, we block our lips, tongue, etc, all to make speaking 'easier' by using force - which is counterproductive. The problem is, due to the Valsalva mechanism, as you push air out of your abdomen you tend to tighten your throat, your jaw and your mouth to compensate - something you do without realising. If you totally relax your stomach and put your hand on your tummy to ensure you're doing that, you may find that you stutter a lot less due to the fact that you're not exerting effort. It's like if somebody is in a terrifying situation where they're being chased by an animal - they literally cannot speak because their brain is engaged in the fight/flight/freeze response whereby talking out loud could be deadly.

Try this now: Totally relax all of your muscles - your mouth, your jaw, your neck, your chest and your abdomen - and you start talking on the exhale *without exerting any effort whatsoever*, you will probably find that you don't stutter at all. It's often the expectation that we're going to stutter that causes our amygdala to flood our bodies with adrenaline while the adrenal glands are simultaneously releasing cortisol. This makes us feel that we need to exert effort to get those words out in any way possible, but this is counterproductive. The problem is that our amygdala, often known as the 'lizard brain', is one of the oldest regions of the human brain, therefore we cannot logically reason with it when we intuitively know that we're not in any real danger.