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How I mostly beat my stutter Ok. I've been wanting to post this for a while. Forward: please don't read this like a humblebrag or something - it's not meant to be, and this is a throwaway. I remember the visceral gut reaction to other people telling me how they magically cured a speech impediment like it was simple. I hated them and condescendingly assumed that MY stutter was different - a permanent one, a REAL one. I'm only writing this because I figure if it can help just one person, it's like saving a life. I grew up with a pretty bad stutter - mostly prolonging of consonants like S, F, and R, but also lots of the stereotypical repetitions. Also learned to be a pro at avoidance (aka looking like a fool) with "uhs" and ostensibly subtle word replacements. Now I stutter probably less than the average person (unless I'm high, which is weird), and I'm a law student with a job set up at a top law firm where I will be negotiating deals over the phone for large companies - something that used to be my worst nightmare and nowhere where I thought I could ever be even 5 or 6 years ago. Physical origin: Before the truthers come out and say that my stutter was not a "real" stutter (instead more of an anxiety problem or something), I want to give a few more details about where and how this started. My father's parents were both deaf, and he also had and still has a severe stutter. We should all know that stuttering is hereditary. I've read a few studies and heard from a speech therapist that hearing children of the deaf have a much higher incidence of speech impediments, and scientists think it's because the part of the brain responsible for elocutionary motor skills (Broca's area) is switched over to other verbal skills because it wasn't used by the deaf. I'm too lazy/busy to find the link on that but if someone still have access to academic databases, please post. So basically that means I probably have a lower bar to stutter because the part of the brain that controls speech is stunted and switched over to other verbal stuff. This rang true for me because I always sucked at math but scored off the charts on verbal stuff on standardized tests even though I could barely speak - that was always a depressing irony to me until I understood it. So how did I mostly end it? First, treating the anxiety that we all have that has exacerbates our stuttering since we were 4 or 5. Second, a simple change in attitude - a life change - of consciously enunciating and slowly powering through every word. No gimmicks like sing-songy voices or breathy onsets or anything like that. It took a few years and the first step was the hardest, but it worked. Also, part of this was seeking the stage (a long tradition from Churchill to motherfucking Samuel L) by working "people jobs" and eventually tackling the Socratic method in law school. In getting past the anxiety, I largely credit a book by [Dr. William Parry on the Valsalva maneuver](http://www.valsalva.org/valsalva.htm) combined with general mindfulness/meditation techniques. Parry is a lawyer and conquered his stutter late in life by studying his body and realizing that much of the stutter was onset (though not caused) by a deep anxiety that we all have after growing up with a stutter. That explains how most stutterers achieve fluency when talking to themselves or singing. The Valsalva maneuver is the body's way of pushing something out that is brought on by anxiety. If any of you bros even lift, it's what you do when you bench press. For the rest of you, it's the holding of air in your lungs when you take a big dump. Seriously. Just read the book. The next step has no secret - it's just honesty. No word substitutions, no bullshit. I just said the words I wanted to say slowly. It's deceptively simple and almost impossible without killing your anxiety, but it surprisingly only took 6 months or so to achieve peak fluency after I learned to control my body's Valsalva response to speaking. This probably won't work for everyone, and maybe my genetic predisposition to stuttering is different than most of yours. Still, I hope this at least leads one person to fluency.