How to stop saying “um”: a 7-day plan that swaps fillers for pauses

Why do you say “um”?

You say “um” because you're planning the next thing while you're still talking. Speech runs faster than thought for a moment, and a filler holds your place until the words arrive.

That's why fillers aren't random. In one study of task-based conversations, people were more disfluent when they were the one giving instructions and when the topic was harder to put into words (abstract shapes rather than photos). Age made only a slight difference.^[1] More planning, more fillers.

Psycholinguists Herbert Clark and Jean Fox Tree went further. Looking at large collections of recorded everyday speech, they argued that “uh” and “um” are real English words that speakers choose: “uh” to announce a short delay, “um” a longer one.^[2] Not everyone agrees. Daniel O'Connell and Sabine Kowal measured the silence after each filler in six media interviews and found that most fillers weren't followed by a pause at all, so they doubt fillers can signal a delay.^[3] The honest summary: fillers are tied to planning, and researchers still argue about whether they're a deliberate signal.

Which filler you reach for is partly social. Across English, Dutch, German and other Germanic languages, “um” has been gaining on “uh” for decades, a change led by women and more educated speakers.^[11] So if you say “um” more than your parents did, you're in good company.

Fillers do a small job for listeners

Listeners seem to notice. In Fox Tree's experiments, hearing “uh” helped people recognise the words that came next, while “um” had neither a good nor a bad effect.^[4] In another study, people who heard a speaker hesitate looked sooner at an object that hadn't been mentioned yet, as if the hesitation told them something new was coming.^[5] And in a memory experiment, listeners recalled parts of a story better when a filler came before them than when a cough of the same length did.^[6]

None of that means you should add more. Those studies used a few fillers in a recorded story or a lab task. It means a few fillers are normal and do no harm. The goal is fewer, not none.

Are filler words bad?

Not in small numbers. They start to cost you when they cluster: three at the start of an answer, or one before every key point.

The clearest numbers come from a 2024 study. Researchers built short speeches with 0, 2, 5 or 12 fillers per minute and asked online raters to judge the speaker. At 12 a minute, filler sounds like “um” and “uh” hurt how the speaker came across on most measures. At 5 a minute, ratings weren't harmed.^[7] That's one study with recorded speeches and online raters, so treat it as a useful line, not a law.

Where they fall matters too. A filler in the middle of a long, thoughtful answer goes unnoticed. The same filler as the first sound of your answer to “Why should we hire you?” tells the room you're still deciding what to say.

One more thing. This guide is about everyday fillers. If you stammer or stutter (repeating sounds, getting stuck on a word, or avoiding words because of it), that's different, and a speech and language therapist is the right person to talk to. Pushing yourself to “just pause” isn't the answer there.

Count yours first

Get your number before you change anything. Most people guess wrong, in both directions.

The counter sorts fillers into four groups, because they have different causes and different fixes:

• Hesitation sounds: um, uh, er, erm, hmm. Always counted.
• Padding starters: “So,” “Well,” “Okay,” “Right,” at the start of a sentence. Counted only there; “it went well” is fine.
• Restarts: “I mean”, “or rather”, “hold on”. Usually a sign the first version of the sentence didn't land.
• Hedges: “you know”, “I think”, “kind of”, “sort of”. Counted as a habit, not a mistake. Sometimes “I think” is exactly what you mean.

Words like “like”, “basically” and “actually” are marked but not counted, because they're just as often real words. More on those below.

What's a good number? Our coach aims for two or fewer a minute. That's a working target in the app, which we're still calibrating, not a scientific threshold. It's stricter than the five a minute that did no harm in the 2024 study, on purpose: fillers rise under pressure, so practising below the line leaves you room on the day.

Write down three things from your first count: fillers per minute, your most-used filler, and where they cluster (sentence starts, joins between ideas, or just before a number or name).

The 7-day plan

Five minutes a day, one change at a time. Each day matches a free rep in Chapter 1 of the app, so you can do it there and see your fillers marked on the replay, or do it with your phone's voice recorder and the counter above.

The plan follows the two steps that small trials of filler training have used. First, notice each filler as it happens. Then do something else in its place, usually a short silent pause. In the first of these studies, all six participants used fewer fillers straight after training.^[8] In another, noticing alone cut fillers for all four students, though each needed top-up sessions, and the gains mostly held in front of a small audience.^[9] Seven such studies were published between 2016 and 2022.^[10] They're small, mostly with university students, but they point the same way.

Day 1: Count your ums

Talk for 45 seconds about a normal day at work, from the first hour to the last. Play it back and count every filler. Don't try to change anything yet. You're training your ear, which is the “noticing” step the research starts with.

Day 2: Breathe, don't fill

Read a short passage out loud. At every full stop, close your mouth and breathe in through your nose. Reading takes away the planning, so you can practise the mechanics on their own: a filler needs an open mouth and a voice switched on. A closed mouth can't say “um”.

Day 3: Drop the starter words

Many fillers hide at the start of sentences: “so”, “and”, “well”, “basically”. Give a quick update on something you finished recently, and start every sentence on its first real word. Hit that word a little harder than usual so it does the job the starter was doing.

Day 4: Start in silence

The first second of an answer is where fillers love to live. Today, before every answer, breathe out slowly for four counts, then start on a real word. Practise on surprise prompts: get someone to fire questions at you, or write five on cards and turn them over one at a time.

Day 5: Buy time with a pause

When a hard question lands, your body wants to fill the silence straight away. Today you don't. Pause for two full seconds, then start with a real word. Answer three tricky questions: “What's your biggest weakness?”, “What would you change about how your team works?” and “What's the weakest part of your argument?”

Two seconds will feel endless. On the recording, it sounds like someone thinking. That gap between how a pause feels and how it sounds is the whole reason to record yourself.

Day 6: One clean minute

Now put it together in your own words, with nothing to read. Talk for a minute about your week: what went well and what's still open. When you feel an “um” coming, pause instead. Aim for fewer fillers than on Day 1, not zero.

Day 7: Your real moment

Pick something real from the coming week: a meeting update, an interview answer, a call you're dreading. Rehearse it once with the same rules. Then record a fresh minute and count again. Compare with Day 1: fillers per minute, your favourite filler, and where they cluster now.

If the number has dropped, keep one rep a day for another week; the training studies needed top-ups too. If it hasn't, look at where they cluster. Starts of answers? Go back to Day 4. Joins between ideas? Day 2.

Why “just pause” is hard, and what helps

Pausing is hard because silence feels much longer to the speaker than to the listener. Under pressure, a one-second gap can feel like five, so your brain grabs any sound to end it.

Three things make it easier:

1. Know how long a pause is. Aim for one to two seconds: about the time it takes to breathe in. Count “one” silently at full stops, “one, two” after a question.
2. Plan the first word, not the whole sentence. Fillers fill the gap while you look for a way in. If you know your next sentence starts with “The” or “We” or “Two”, you only need the first word to get going.
3. Use signposts. “Two things.” “Here's the problem.” “The short answer is yes.” A signpost gives you a real phrase to say while you plan, and it helps listeners follow. Our guide to speaking slower has more on where pauses do the most work.

Other fillers: like, so, you know, basically

These work differently from “um”, because they're also real words. Before you cut one, check which job it's doing.

Starters (“so”, “well”, “okay”) and mid-sentence fillers (“you know”, “like”) need different fixes. Starters go when you know your first word. Mid-sentence fillers go when you break long sentences into shorter ones with pauses between them.

Fillers in interviews and presentations

Fillers cluster where the planning load spikes. In interviews, that's the first second after a question. In presentations, it's the moment you move to a new slide.

In interviews

Use Day 5: pause, then answer. A two-second pause after a hard question reads as thought. If you need longer, say so with a real sentence: “Good question. Let me pick the best example.” That sentence is honest, and it buys you three seconds. Then open with your point: “Two things.” More in our interview practice guide.

In presentations

Most slide-change fillers come from clicking, seeing the slide and then working out what to say about it. Flip the order. Say the bridge first (“So that's the cost. Now, the timeline.”), click, glance at the slide in silence, then speak. Or rehearse the first sentence of each slide until it's automatic. See presentation practice.