At high and medium frequencies, sound is like water. That means that a small gap can spoil the insulation. That's why recording studios are built as ‘boxes within boxes’.
Low frequencies require mass-spring systems in which the walls are decoupled.
Sound absorption panels don't do anything about insulation. They just condition the sound inside the room or make it less "echoy".
DIY Sound isolation is very, very difficult. If you want to do it, call an acoustic company that knows what they are doing. Not a generic construction company.
I make my living as a voice actor. I've done everything from audiobooks, commercials, ADR to corporate.
The best thing you can do is practice, practice, practice, but with good guidance.
The first thing is to love and admit your voice. A lot of people try to sound deeper, more impostured, etc. They try to put on a voice they don't have. And the first thing is to recognise the sound of your voice. Your voice is your voice. You don't have to do anything special with it. Just accept it, understand how it works. It's that easy, it's that hard.
There are plenty of schools that teach voice acting. It is a difficult profession to be self-taught, as it requires an ability to "isolate yourself from yourself", as well as being directed by an outside observer. It is exactly the same as learning to act. You can learn from videos, books, but there is no substitute for physical learning with another person.
Audiobooks are one of the most difficult genres to work in.
They require you to tell the story, but you can't be more of a protagonist than the story. In most of them, I listen more to the narrator than to the story itself, which is a problem, as it is the story that has to transcend.
If you are curious, one of the classics to read are Cicely Berry's books "Voice and the actor" and "Freeing the natural voice" from Kristin Linklater.
If I may ask: How did your journey as a voice actor start, and how did you happen to make a living off of it?
I love to read aloud for decades, do a bit of different voices per character... And people seem to like my voice when I moderate our daily rounds or do presentations. I just learned that in the last 12 months, so maybe there is a hidden talent that needs to be unveiled.
I got to know the world of voice acting because I am a sound engineer and I had to record quite a few people. I started when I took acting classes, but the truth is that since I was little I liked to clown around with my voice. I've taken TONS of classes over the years.
There are so many genres where a voice actor can do voice acting. Think of anywhere you hear a voice. There is a voice actor behind it.
I don't know what area you live in but if it's something you're interested in, I'd look into where you can take classes.
In kindergarten, 35 years ago, I was taught "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all." That saying comes from a movie that came out 45 years before that.
So people not saying what they think just to be liked is certainly not "in these times" thing. It's something children have been taught for at least the last century.
To complement what you say, you also have to consider that there are an absolute myriad of processes, people and companies within the audiovisual industry where the Dolby workflow is almost inseparable from what they do and what they work with. People and companies that have made investments, sometimes of many zeros and many hours, to be able to work this way.
Dolby is more than a standard or spitting six channels of raw audio out of speakers. That's just the end product, because it's not just standard itself.
It is, for example, the hardware that is in cinemas and home theaters (encoders, decoders, Dolby RMU...), the certification processes that Dolby does in cinemas and recording and mixing studios, the mixing technicians who work with all that and send the final mixes with the netflix/hbo/whatever specifications, vendors, integration partners, speaker manufacturers...
There are also plugins that work in DAWs like Pro Tools, the ecosystem (Dolby Atmos Renderer, Dolby Atmos Production Suite), just to scratch the surface.
One thing is to publish a standard and another the ecosystem around that standard. It is interesting that there are new standards, but given Google's history with its long term attention span I have my doubts that this will materialize into anything more than an internal asset for google.
I suspect your starting point was different than OP's. He is describing (I think) a crippling nervousness. This is very different from just tensing or run-of-the-mill nervousness.
All your advice is great, but (from personal experience) it's not enough to overcome phobia-level tension.
I think many people don't understand what phobia-level tension even looks/feels like. My own worst moment: presenting an architectural diagram to a VP, I started panicking, and repeated the phrase "...and we're going to build an abstraction layer..." three or four times in a row, in a slow monotone voice, until someone in the room snapped me out of it. Embarrassing is an understatement.
Low frequencies require mass-spring systems in which the walls are decoupled.
Sound absorption panels don't do anything about insulation. They just condition the sound inside the room or make it less "echoy".
DIY Sound isolation is very, very difficult. If you want to do it, call an acoustic company that knows what they are doing. Not a generic construction company.