Working through your stuttering is hard enough without making it worse with things that add anxiety. That’s why, early on in my efforts to improve my speech, I decided I was going to do everything I could to become more calm.
I called it: “Lowering my set point.” I wanted my normal level of anxiety to be a low as possible; thus, to be as calm as I could be all the time.
Did it help? Absolutely. It was essential to making improvement and gaining traction in my progress (not slipping backward so often). Here’s what I did.
Anxiety and Stuttering
Anxiety may be the root cause of stuttering, but it sure appears to make it worse. There are numerous studies on the subject.
In my own stuttering, stress definitely added to my stuttering. Perhaps even more so, my own stuttering added to my anxiety.
My mind raced every time I talked; every time I even thought about talking. How could I get through this sound, that word, the next sentence? Would I substitute a word, which word — no, maybe I can’t get through that word, either? Which word will work? Race, race all the time.
As a result, I was always on high alert to avoid stuttering. For me, high anxiety was my constant normal.
When I began to really try to work through my stuttering, I realized that my high level of stress was holding me back from making any meaningful progress. I had to become more calm. Better yet, I had to develop a normal state of calm. But how?
Become More Calm - Changing Your Daily Living Habits
If you’ve read my blog post on Small Steps, you probably already know that I am going to start with the easiest step first — that’s what I always do. First, change your diet. If you love your morning coffee and spend half your days at coffee houses, this may not be your cup of tea. Cut both: caffeinated coffee and tea. No caffeine, period.
Your body may rebel at first, but this is important — caffeine is your enemy. It hypes you up. Even if you don’t think it does, it’s still probably having some kind of a stimulating effect. You want just the opposite of stimulation; you want a normal state of calm.
If you find yourself unable to get started in the morning without coffee, get more disciplined with your sleep schedule. Go to bed every night at exactly the same time and wake up at about the same time.
For me, that means going to sleep at 11pm and waking up at about 6am. I no longer set an alarm and I almost always wake up at about 6am, give or take 15 minutes (30 minutes occasionally). By setting a sleep schedule, you give up one stress-building habit (caffeine) to gain a stress-reducing habit (regular sleep).
Exercise is another easy way to become more calm. I rarely miss a day of exercise, because I schedule it first thing in the morning. My goal is to work out for a half-hour or so, sweat, breathe hard, and don’t get hurt. I do different workouts every other day: a high-intensity workout three days a week and an indoor bike workout the other three days. On the seventh day I walk. Regular exercise helps reduce stress, clear your mind and gives you energy. I find it essential to maintaining a positive mindset.
There are many other ways to become more calm, most notably meditation and mindfulness. I really don’t do either specifically, but I do things every day that probably have a similar impact. We’re all different. Find what works for you. If it leads you to a greater state of calm through your day, do it.
Address Your Speech -- Don't Avoid
Perhaps the most powerful thing you can do to become more calm is to address your speech. Avoidance breeds stress. You can face your speech without raising your stress levels. Here’s how I did it.
First, take a constructive view of your speech. For example, rather than view speaking as something to be feared, I would play with my speech to try and enjoy every conversation. Playing with my speech and taking offensive actions rather than defensive enabled me to take control rather than let stuttering take control of me.
When I was trying to improve my speech, taking small steps helped me to stay calm even though I was continually pushing my envelope. Rather than pressure myself to take big leaps with my speech (for which I was usually not ready), I broke my stuttering into small steps and tried to progress one small step at a time. This enabled me to get traction in improving my speech without appreciably increasing stress levels.
In fact, for me, just about every time I made a little progress with my speech I felt my stress levels decrease. Addressing your stuttering rather than avoiding it will improve your level of calm. In my case, I only gained calm when I took active actions, such as playing with my speech and taking small steps. I never made any sustainable progress with passive, thought-based approaches.
In my experience, stuttering is a tough nut to crack — nothing passive is going to make a dent. Change demands action.
Setting Your Foundation
Overall, the goal is to maintain a relative state of calm all the time. To do so, you need to engage in both physical and psychological strategies. This is an all-fronts effort. There are always going to be stressors popping up in your life, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel terribly stressed — you can still be calm in the face of calamity. It also doesn’t mean that your stuttering has to increase. One does not necessarily lead to the other.
In this post, I’ve discussed the foundational basics of how to become more calm. To truly maintain a state of calm, I strongly suggest you also develop a foundation for more relaxed speaking.
That’s one of the biggest benefits of Breathe, Emphasize, Phrase (BEP): 1) You know you have a foundation of speaking you can always rely on; and 2) The more you breathe, the more calm you will feel. The more I did BEP, the more I became convinced that every time I took a full breath I would feel more and more calm. For me, speaking gradually changed from a struggle that produced panic to a joy that generated calm.
Developing a normal state of calm was essential to gaining traction in improving my speech. Before doing these four strategies to become more calm — changing my daily living habits, playing with my speech, taking small steps and making BEP my automatic way of speaking — I would make a little progress, then slip back, sometimes falling back to square one. It was maddening! Those four strategies changed all that, by making me significantly more calm nearly all the time.
Sure, there are always going to be tense moments, you can’t live in a bubble. But by taking these four steps to become more calm, you will be giving yourself a much better chance of becoming consistently comfortable with your speaking.
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