How to Stop Saying "Um" When Speaking — What Actually Works

Why your brain uses filler words

Filler words are not a sign of poor vocabulary or low intelligence. Linguists have studied them extensively, and the research is clear: filler words are a natural part of speech production. They serve a specific function in how your brain processes language in real time.

When you speak, your brain is doing several things simultaneously — retrieving words from memory, constructing sentence structure, planning what comes next, and monitoring whether the listener is following you. Filler words appear at the exact points where this processing hits a bottleneck. Your mouth is ready to produce sound, but your brain hasn't finished deciding what the next word should be. Rather than falling silent, your speech system inserts a placeholder sound — "um" or "uh" — to signal that you're still talking, still thinking, not finished.

This is why everyone uses filler words, including professional speakers, politicians, and news anchors. The difference is frequency, not presence. A few fillers per minute sound natural. A filler every few seconds sounds uncertain.

Why anxiety makes it worse

Under stress, your cognitive resources narrow. The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for planning, word retrieval, and working memory — operates less efficiently when the fight-or-flight system is active. This means the bottleneck that produces filler words gets worse. Your brain takes longer to find the next word, and the gap that needs filling gets wider.

Anxiety also makes you hyperaware of how you sound, which creates a secondary problem. You start monitoring yourself for filler words, which splits your attention between what you're saying and how you're saying it. That divided attention slows your word retrieval even further, producing more fillers. It's the same kind of feedback loop that makes a shaky voice worse: noticing the problem amplifies the problem.

This is why you might speak fluently to friends at dinner but fill every sentence with "um" during a work presentation. It's not a different vocabulary. It's a different level of cognitive load.

Why "just stop saying um" doesn't work

The most common advice for filler words is simply to become aware of them and stop. This is like telling someone with a stammer to stop stammering. Filler words are produced by an unconscious speech system. You can't override an unconscious process with a conscious instruction — at least not reliably, and especially not under pressure.

What happens when you try is that you create a new source of anxiety. Now you're not only worried about the content of your presentation — you're also worried about saying "um." Every time one slips out, you register it as a failure, which increases your stress, which produces more fillers. The cure becomes the disease.

Counting your fillers — another common suggestion — has the same problem. It turns every speaking situation into a test you're failing, which is the last thing someone with public speaking anxiety needs.

What actually reduces filler words

The most effective approaches work on the underlying cause — the processing bottleneck — rather than trying to suppress the symptom.

Embrace the pause. The single most powerful technique is replacing filler words with silence. Not by forcing yourself to stop saying "um," but by giving yourself permission to pause. Most people fill gaps because silence feels dangerous — it feels like you've lost your place, like the audience is judging you. In reality, a short pause between sentences sounds confident and deliberate to listeners. It only feels awkward to you. Practising short pauses when speaking aloud alone is the fastest way to retrain the habit. Start with a two-second pause between sentences and let yourself sit in the silence.

Reduce your cognitive load. Filler words increase when your brain is working hard to figure out what to say next. If you're speaking without any structure, your brain is simultaneously generating content and forming sentences in real time — that's a heavy load. Having a simple structure in mind before you speak (three main points, a beginning-middle-end framework, or even just knowing your opening sentence) dramatically reduces the processing bottleneck. You don't need a script. You need an outline.

Slow down. Speaking pace is directly correlated with filler frequency. When you speak quickly, your brain has less time to process the next thought before your mouth needs to produce it. Slowing down by even 10-15% gives your word retrieval system the time it needs, which means fewer gaps to fill. This is counterintuitive because anxiety makes you want to speed up and get through it, but the speed itself is part of the problem.

Record yourself and listen back. Not to count fillers — that's punitive. But to notice your pattern. Most people have a specific filler word and a specific context where it appears. You might say "so" at the start of every answer to a question. You might say "um" only when transitioning between topics. Once you identify the pattern, you can target that specific moment rather than trying to fix everything at once.

What about Toastmasters and the "ah counter"?

Toastmasters International, the well-known public speaking organisation, uses an "ah counter" role in meetings — someone who tracks and reports each speaker's filler words. For people who are already confident speakers looking to polish their delivery, this can be motivating. For people with public speaking anxiety, it's often counterproductive.

The reason is that filler counting adds a layer of evaluation on top of an already anxiety-laden situation. If your core problem is that speaking feels threatening, adding another metric to fail at does not reduce the threat. It increases it. Research on exposure-based approaches suggests that the most important factor in reducing speaking anxiety is creating a sense of safety — not adding more performance pressure.

This doesn't mean feedback is bad. It means the feedback needs to come in a safe context, at a pace you control, without the social pressure of being evaluated by a room full of people in real time.

The goal isn't zero

Perfectly filler-free speech sounds unnatural. Listen closely to any speaker you admire — a podcaster, a lecturer, a TED speaker — and you'll hear occasional fillers. The difference is that they don't have many, and the ones they do have don't derail their delivery. They're not aiming for zero. They're aiming for fluent.

Fluent speech isn't the absence of imperfection. It's speech where the fillers are infrequent enough that neither you nor your listener notices them. Getting there isn't about willpower or self-monitoring. It's about reducing the processing load that creates them in the first place — through structure, pace, practice, and gradually learning that silence is not the enemy.