Every guide on this topic gives you the same instruction: pause instead of saying "um." That advice is correct and almost useless on its own, because the filler is already out of your mouth before the conscious part of your brain notices it happened. You cannot pause instead of a word you did not know you were about to say.
What actually moves the number is measurement. Fillers are a habit with a rate, and rates respond to being tracked in a way that vague intentions do not. The same principle drives every other delivery fix — it is why how to improve public speaking comes down to recorded reps rather than reading, and why how to be more articulate is a training problem rather than a vocabulary problem.
Here is the full method, in order:
- Record two minutes of real, unscripted speech — an answer, an update, an opinion you hold.
- Tally every filler on playback and divide by the minutes to get your fillers-per-minute rate.
- Sort the tally into three types: hesitation fillers, crutch words, and starter fillers. They have different causes.
- Mark where they cluster. Almost all of them land at the seams between thoughts, not inside sentences.
- Rehearse the transitions, because the seam is the thing that is broken, not your vocabulary.
- Replace the filler with a closed-mouth breath, which makes the pause physically possible instead of merely intended.
- Slow your opening thirty seconds on purpose — the rate you set early is the rate you keep.
- Re-record and re-count once a week, and compare only against your own previous number.
Why do I use filler words in the first place?
Because your mouth is faster than your sentence planner. A filler is the sound of your brain buying time while it assembles what comes next — linguists describe it as a signal that more, and usually more complex, material is on the way rather than as a malfunction. Research summarized by TIME notes that speakers tend to use "uh" before short delays and "um" before longer ones, which means the sound is doing real work: it holds the floor so nobody talks over you while you think.
That matters for how you fix it. Fillers are not a character flaw or a vocabulary gap, so treating them as one leads to the wrong drills. They are a timing mismatch between speaking and planning, and timing is trainable.
Nervousness does not create fillers out of nothing — it raises your speaking rate, which widens the gap between your mouth and your planner. That is why the same person has a clean rate in a relaxed conversation and a terrible one on a video call. If nerves are your trigger, how to calm presentation nerves addresses the upstream cause.
What counts as a filler word?
Three distinct types, with three different fixes. Sorting your tally this way is what turns a vague "I say um too much" into something you can actually train:
- Hesitation fillers — "um," "uh," "er." Pure planning noise. These respond to pacing and breath.
- Crutch words — "like," "basically," "actually," "sort of," "you know." These are habits of phrasing rather than hesitation, and they respond to rehearsal of specific sentences.
- Starter fillers — "So," "Yeah, so," "I mean," "I guess" glued to the front of an answer. These are almost always a stalling reflex before a question you have not decided how to answer, and they respond to preparing your first five words.
Most people assume they have an "um" problem and discover on playback that they have a starter-filler problem: every single answer begins with "So..." That is a much easier fix, and you will never find it without counting.
How many filler words is normal?
Not zero, and aiming for zero is what makes people quit. Estimates in the disfluency research put the rate of disfluencies in spontaneous speech as high as 6 per 100 words, while a controlled norming study of natural narrative speech measured 1.86 fillers per 100 words (Fraundorf & Watson, 2011). Fluent, professional speakers are inside that range — they are not empty of fillers, their fillers are just infrequent enough that nobody notices.
Source: Fraundorf & Watson, 2011
In practice, per-minute counting is easier than per-hundred-words. Record two minutes, tally, divide. Whatever number you get is your baseline, and the only comparison that matters is next week's number against this week's.
Where do filler words actually happen?
At the seams. Play back your recording and mark the timestamp of every filler, and you will find they cluster in three places:
- The first three seconds of an answer, before you have decided what the answer is.
- The join between two points, where the previous thought has ended and the next one has not loaded yet.
- The middle of a sentence you started before you knew how it ended — the run-on that eventually becomes rambling.
Notice that none of these are "everywhere." Fillers are not sprayed evenly across your speech; they sit at structural gaps. That is genuinely good news, because it means you do not have to police every word. You have to fix two or three joins.
How to stop using filler words at the transitions
This is the actual drill, and it is the part every three-minute listicle skips.
Take the material you are rehearsing and write down only the transition sentences — the one line that carries you from point one to point two, and from point two to point three. Two or three sentences total. Then say those sentences out loud, on their own, five times each, until the join is as automatic as your name.
Why this works: the filler is not a word you chose, it is the sound of a gap. Rehearsing the transition removes the gap, so there is nothing for the filler to fill. Trying to suppress the "um" while the gap remains just produces a longer, more visible stall.
Do the same for your first five words. Decide the opening of your answer literally word for word — "There are three reasons" or "The short version is" — and the starter filler disappears, because the stall it was covering no longer exists.
What do you replace a filler word with?
A closed-mouth breath. Not "a pause" in the abstract — a specific physical action, because "pause" is an intention and intentions lose to habits.
Close your lips and breathe in through your nose at the moment you would have said "um." This works for a mechanical reason: you cannot make a vocal filler while inhaling through a closed mouth. It converts a rule you have to remember into a physical state that makes the mistake impossible. It also refills the breath you need for the next sentence, so your voice projection holds through to the end of the line instead of thinning out.
The silence will feel enormous to you. It is roughly half a second, and listeners hear it as composure. This is the single most reliable perception gap in all of speaking: your pauses feel about three times longer from the inside than they sound from the outside. Once the filler is gone, the silence it was occupying becomes something you can use deliberately — how to use pauses when speaking covers where those gaps belong and how long each one should be.
Why does slowing down reduce filler words?
Because the gap between your mouth and your planner closes when your mouth moves slower. Most people trying to fix fillers attack the fillers directly and leave their speaking rate untouched, which is why the habit comes straight back under pressure.
Set the pace in your opening thirty seconds and the rest of the talk tends to follow it. If your baseline pace is the problem rather than your planning, how to stop talking too fast covers the underlying fix; if your sentences keep running past their natural end, the related habit is covered in how to stop rambling when you talk.
Should you eliminate filler words completely?
No — and trying to is counterproductive in conversation. Fillers do real conversational work: they hold the floor, signal that you are still thinking, and make speech sound human rather than recited. A person with literally zero fillers in a casual conversation sounds like they are reading.
The honest goal is relocation, not elimination. Get your rate low enough in high-stakes moments — the interview answer, the board update, the toast — that nobody notices it, and stop worrying about it entirely over coffee. The difference between a speaker who sounds polished and one who sounds nervous is rarely zero versus some. It is two per minute versus twelve.
A three-week plan that actually lowers the number
- Week 1 — measure only. Record two minutes, three times. Tally and sort into the three types. Change nothing. The number will already start dropping, because awareness does a surprising amount of the work on its own.
- Week 2 — fix the seams. Write out your transitions and your first five words. Rehearse those lines in isolation, five reps each. Re-record and re-count.
- Week 3 — add the breath and the pace. Practise the closed-mouth breath at each seam, and deliberately slow your first thirty seconds. Re-record and re-count.
Three weeks of this beats three years of resolving to say "um" less. If you want the counting done for you, an AI speech coach tallies fillers live so you can spend the session on the transitions instead of on rewinding, and the broader comparison of tools is in the best public speaking app roundup.
Key takeaways
- Count before you correct — you cannot fix a habit you cannot yet hear.
- Record two minutes, tally, divide by minutes. That rate is your only real baseline.
- Sort fillers into hesitation fillers, crutch words, and starter fillers; each has a different fix.
- Fillers cluster at transitions, not evenly across your speech.
- Rehearse the two or three transition sentences, not the whole talk.
- Replace the filler with a closed-mouth breath — a physical action, not an intention.
- Slow your first thirty seconds; pace sets the gap that fillers fill.
- Aim for unnoticeable, not zero. Fluent speakers still use fillers.
- Compare each week's count only against your own previous week.
Frequently asked questions
How do I stop saying um specifically?
Find where your "um"s land rather than trying to suppress them everywhere. Record two minutes, note the timestamp of each one, and you will almost always find they cluster at the start of answers and at the join between points. Rehearse those specific transition sentences out loud five times each, and replace the moment itself with a closed-mouth breath in through the nose — you physically cannot say "um" while doing it.
How do I stop saying like so often?
"Like" is a crutch word rather than a hesitation filler, so pacing fixes do not touch it. It is a habit of phrasing, which means it responds to sentence-level rehearsal: pick the two or three sentences where it appears most on playback and say those exact sentences without it, several times. It also spikes when you are approximating rather than committing, so being specific — a real number, a real example — removes the need for it.
Are filler words in speech actually bad?
In casual conversation, no — they hold the floor and make you sound human. In high-stakes settings they cost you, because a high rate reads as uncertainty or lack of preparation to listeners. The practical answer is to lower your rate where it is being judged and ignore it everywhere else, rather than trying to purge fillers from your speech entirely.
Why do I use filler words more when I am nervous?
Nerves raise your speaking rate, which widens the gap between how fast you are talking and how fast you are planning the next sentence. Fillers fill that gap. This is why the fix is pacing and rehearsed transitions rather than willpower — you are treating the cause instead of the symptom.
How long does it take to reduce filler words?
The first drop happens within a few sessions, because simply counting them makes you hear them in real time. Getting the rate reliably low under pressure takes closer to three weeks of recorded reps, since that part depends on the transitions being rehearsed rather than on awareness alone.
Does reading out loud help reduce filler words?
Barely, and it is one of the most common wasted drills. Reading has no planning gap — the next sentence is already on the page — so it never trains the thing that actually fails. Practise with real, unscripted material where you have to assemble sentences in real time, which is where the fillers actually come from.
Conclusion
Filler words are not a discipline problem, they are a measurement problem with a timing cause. Count your rate, sort what you find, rehearse the two or three seams where the fillers cluster, and breathe through the gap instead of talking through it. Record two minutes today and write the number down — that number is where the fix starts.