I think it is possible to relax or slow down actually, it’s just incredibly difficult to actually put it in practice. There’s a difference between practicing keeping your anxiety under control to overcome a block while alone or in therapy, versus actually being in conversation with someone else. The latter naturally puts a lot more pressure on you. I had a horrible stutter when I was a kid, then I went to this stuttering school in Varaždin, Croatia. The speech therapy they had at this school was unlike any other speech “therapy” I had in the US. In the US I was grouped with kids who had non-stuttering speech impediments, and they never taught me real techniques, we just basically practiced talking. But this school went to the actual root of why we stutter, and it was very eye opening. Every student at this school had a stutter, both adults and kids. It was specifically for stuttering. We practiced talking with our breath instead of our vocal cords; it comes a lot more naturally that way instead of trying to “force” it out. We practiced meditation to keep our anxiety under control, to pace our breathing and keep it calm and slow so when we talk it’s calm and slow. They had these little toys that you could expand and contract, it was supposed to be a representation of our lungs. We would synchronize the expansion and contracting of the toy with the breathing of our lungs, and we practiced talking *with* the contraction of the toys & our lungs. It was a way to practice talking with our breathing, using our breathing as a tool to talk more “naturally”, mindfully with our breath instead of mindlessly against it. We practiced talking softly. They taught us to start with a very slight and barely noticeable “uh” if we anticipate a block. My stuttering was (almost) cured. Years later as an adult, it comes back from time to time, but I remember the techniques I learned in this school. I remind myself that my stuttering is intimately connected to my anxiety and my mere *anticipation* of a stutter. Based on my own personal experiences, I think stuttering (for most people) is psychological, and us worrying about stuttering is a large cause or our stutter. Obviously this isn’t the case for everyone, like people with TBI’s. But I suspect this is the case for people who have been stuttering since early childhood, it’s mostly psychological and **it is possible to overcome it**. I don’t disagree with your advice btw, a quick fix to overcoming a block is using synonyms.