Stuttering is one of the most common speech disorders in the world, with approximately 66 million people suffering from it. If you suffer from stuttering, you're aware of the impact it can have on your life, not through the actual disorder but through its psychological and behavioral effects. People who stutter find themselves shying away from parties, crowds and events where they might have to talk to friends and strangers, leading to a very isolated and lonely lifestyle. While there's no way to completely cure stuttering, there are ways by which it can be diminished such as self-therapy, speech language pathology and speech clinics.
Instructions
1. Choose the right stuttering therapy for you. While going to speech clinics and using speech language pathologists can help, it's also an expensive option that must be considered as a last resort. First, opt for self-therapy and see how far it gets you. Remember that stuttering cannot be controlled overnight. It takes dedication and practice over time.
2. Form a habit that induces slow talking. When you talk slow, you reduce the time pressure that most people who stutter face and hence decrease anxiety that can cause your throat muscles to tense more and thus cause you to stutter more. Also, slow talking leads to deliberation of words, which helps control and contain stuttering
3. Stutter without forcing the words to leave your lips. This sounds strange, but is a very effecting way of controlling your stuttering. If your voice is flowing smoothly into the words you mean to say, your stuttering will be quite easy to manage. However, if you get agitated trying to force out the word, the voice takes on a temporary throatiness that will aggravate the stutter. Relax, and begin again.
4. Be open about the fact that you stutter. This will reduce the pressure on you to talk normally, which reduces the psychological and behavioral effects that people who stutter are prone to. This in turn provides an opportunity to contain and control your stuttering at your own pace.
5. Stop all avoidance, postponing and substitution habits. If you've been stuttering for a long time, you've probably been avoiding words you can't pronounce and substituting them for other easier words. To control your stuttering in the long run, you need to use all the words in the language through association with other words and taking the time to get them right.
6. Identify the reactions of your speech muscles to your fluent and stuttering speech. This will help you understand where you're going wrong and also give you the opportunity to work on your stuttering. When are your speech muscles acting improperly and how? What words are you getting stuck on? The more you talk with a vision to exploring your speech muscles, the faster you'll understand how they work, and the closer you'll come to eliminating your stutter.
Tags: speech muscles, your speech, your speech muscles, your stuttering, behavioral effects