How to Stop Saying Um, Like, and Other Filler Words (For Good)

TL;DR. Filler words aren’t bad — they’re a symptom. Three things shrink them: a pause that’s longer than feels comfortable, recording yourself, and shortening your sentences. Trying to white-knuckle them out usually makes it worse. Here is the play-by-play.

Filler words are a feature, not a bug

A short um every fifteen seconds is natural. It signals to listeners “I’m thinking — don’t interrupt me yet.” Most great speakers say um sometimes. The problem isn’t existence. The problem is rate.

Research from communication labs and casual listener studies suggests:

• Under 4 fillers per minute — invisible.
• 4–8 per minute — listeners notice you’re nervous but stay engaged.
• 8+ per minute — listeners start tracking the ums and tune out the content.

Your goal is not zero. Your goal is “low enough that no one notices.”

Why you say um

Three reasons, usually overlapping:

1. Cognitive load. You’re loading the next sentence. Um buys time.
2. Conversational signaling. Silence feels like an invitation for someone else to talk. Um holds the floor.
3. Anxiety. Fast heart rate, shallow breath, racing thoughts. The brain reaches for the easiest sound to make, which is a schwa vowel. That’s an uh or um.

The first two are fine. The third is what you want to address.

What does not work

• Putting tape on your mouth. Counter-productive — it adds shame and stress, both of which raise filler rate.
• Promising yourself “I will not say um.” Negation-based goals don’t work. Your brain hears “um” and the word becomes more available.
• Slamming each um with a mental fine. Same problem. You’re inflating the word’s importance.
• Speaking faster. Filler words increase with speed. Slowing down is more effective.

What does work

1. Replace um with silence (this is the whole trick)

When you feel an um coming on, close your mouth and pause for one full beat. That’s it.

The reason this works: the um is filling a gap. Remove the um, and you have a silent gap. Silent gaps are good. They make you sound considered. They give the audience time to catch up. They give you time to think.

The hard part: a one-beat pause feels like an eternity from the inside. It feels like five seconds. To the audience it feels like a half-second.

Drill. Record yourself answering an open-ended question (“Tell me about your last project”) for 90 seconds. On replay, count the ums. Re-record. On the second take, force a one-beat pause anywhere you’d normally insert an um. Replay. Count.

You will be shocked at the difference.

2. Shorten your sentences

Most filler words happen mid-sentence, when you’ve committed to a long sentence and now you’re trying to remember where it was going. Short sentences have fewer mid-sentence holes.

Compare:

“So the thing about, um, like, the way we’re, you know, approaching the redesign is that, um, we actually want to, like, push back on the existing assumptions because, um, you know, those assumptions kind of, like, predate the new requirements.”

Versus:

“We’re pushing back on the existing assumptions. Those assumptions predate the new requirements.”

Same idea. Zero filler words. The second version sounds smarter because the speaker isn’t trying to hold a fourteen-clause sentence in working memory.

Drill. Take a paragraph you’ve written. Read it out loud. Anywhere you stumble, break the sentence into two.

3. Measure

You cannot improve what you cannot see. Most filler-word problems are invisible to the speaker — you literally don’t hear yourself say um in real time.

The fastest fix is to record yourself for two minutes, get a count, and watch your number trend down over a week.

SpeakVibe does this automatically: every session gives you a filler-word count, the timestamps where each one happened, and a per-session trend. You don’t have to count by hand. (You also get scoring on pace, eye contact, and vocal energy — but if you’re focused on fillers, just watch that one number.)

Common traps

• The filler swap. Someone says “I never say um” and replaces it with “right?” or “actually” or “literally.” Track all filler words, not just the obvious ones.
• The over-correction. Cutting from 12 fillers per minute to 0 in one week makes you sound robotic. Aim for 3–4, not 0.
• The recovery panic. When you do say an um, ignore it and keep going. Apologizing for it (“sorry, um, what I meant…”) doubles the damage.
• The script trap. If you over-script, you end up trying to remember exact words. That spikes filler words. Speak from bullet points, not full sentences.

The four-week plan

Week 1: Measure baseline. Record three 90-second clips. Note your fillers-per-minute on each.

Week 2: Pause drill. Same recording prompt. Force a silent beat anywhere an um would land. Goal: cut your baseline rate in half.

Week 3: Shorten sentences. Take a real piece of content (an upcoming pitch, toast, or update). Rewrite it in shorter sentences. Re-record.

Week 4: Apply in the wild. Use the pause technique in one real meeting. Note how it felt. (It feels weird. That’s fine.)

By the end, you’ll be in the 3–5 fillers-per-minute range, which is what people mean when they say someone “speaks well.”

Want a baseline today?

The fastest way to start is to record yourself for 60 seconds answering “what do you do for work” and see what your filler count is. SpeakVibe gives you the count, the timestamps, and a trend chart, free. You’d be surprised how much you can move in a week.

Related reading: How to overcome the fear of public speaking and 4-7-8 breathing for speech anxiety.