Have a stutter too, I was in speech therapy from when I was 7, and one of the techniques that worked best was to focus on breathing and relaxation. When I blocked on words, the levels of tension in my body was/is extremely high. Specifically in my diaphragm, when there is tension, my chest is more rigid and the tension in mouth and tongue is so much stronger. So they had me focusing on relaxing my diaphragm which wou…
Something I've always been curious about: does the physiological stress or the psychological stress come first? Do you think "I'm stuttering" first, or does that tension you experience precede it?
There is an anticipation you experience, it feeds back from previous instances of stuttering on a sound and can ingrain itself pretty strongly in your psyche. There’s a word for this, “anticipation” or something.
I have a stutter. I went to a speech and language therapist, which helped a little bit. For the longest time I couldn't say words like "Wednesday" (stuttering on the W) or even simple phrases like "Yes sir/ma'am" when at secondary school (I believe this is known as a "block", my mouth just wouldn't work; I froze up). I'm not entirely sure what helped me overcome the problem. If I'm relaxed, my speech is fluent. If I…
> If I take deep breaths and think about what I'm going to say, the stutter rarely shows up.
What if the stress level affects the dopamine level and that affects the stutter? I have a stutter too and this was a very interesting article to add to my "head-canon" on why people stutter. My stutter is also affected by moods. Maybe we're living -- or rather, speaking -- on the edge of the brain-body connection.
I had a roommate with a stutter, but never when telling a joke, talking to the dog, or singing. We are way more complicated than we understand!
I stutter on jokes all the time, it’s pretty pathetic. Good for him, sounds uncharacteristic of a stutterer to be honest. But I’ve never heard of anyone who stutters when they sing. Something about singing makes the fluency a lot easier.
Had a severe stutter as a child. It wasn't until I started meditating about 4 years back, that my stutter no longer holds me back. My experience here lines up with the experience cited by others on the thread. To phrase what seems to have worked for me in a more systematic manner - A. Micro level - deep breathing helps. At the end of a long day, when I am fatigued, my words get slower and harder to get out clean. I t…
My stutter has been my primary source of stress/anxiety for that last 12 years. Its impacted my time in college and then later at Grad School. I've had good days and bad (more good days lately), but i'll never forget the terror I used to feel whenever I had to present something in front of other people. I skipped classes to avoid doing that, i bombed many a presentation because I had trouble with certain sentences an…
It’s ironic you stutter on A because I stutter on D and M, my initials, probably more than any other sounds. Stuttering is such a head game that I think it must be that you end up stuttering more on sounds that are more important to you. For example: I worked in finance a while and started stuttering on the word “million” more than I ever did before! Then I stopped working in finance and that basically went away. Still kind of a tough word, but not very problematic. These days I’m working on a messenger and I kid you not the word “message” is hard to say. It’s pretty absurd.
About 5 to 10% of kids, according to [0] begin to stutter temporarly. My little one started to stutter when she was 3 and after a few days nearly stopped talking altogether because she rather did not speak than stutter, to see this hurt badly. Before that she was actively communicating and joking with us. We felt like we lost a deep connection to her feelings, her emotions, like we lost her. I called a speech therapists and they told me that kids can start to stutter as they develop their language skills and they only start therapy if the stuttering goes on for more than a few months. We had some hard weeks while trying to follow the tips in [1] but luckily it went away. Seeing that she decided not to talk anymore, the effect that stuttering had on her, opened my eyes on what it might mean for someone who suffers from stuttering. All the best for everyone whose affected!
My young son, now 7 (no stutter), did stutter at age 4 and had some level of anxiety. My wife and I discovered that he has an allergy to annatto, a natural seed used for orange dye & nutty flavor, that triggered the stuttering. The stuttering was likely due to slight inflammation in his brain. In this case, slice of organic American (orange) cheese caused him to stutter within 10 minutes. Then we could tell when he h…
This is really fascinating thanks so much for sharing. How did you discover the allergy if the only effect was stuttering?
We noticed he was more tentative and starting to stutter around the winter holidays, but could not figure out what the pattern was. Then one early evening before dinner we gave him a slice of organic, orange American cheese (milk, salt, enzymes, annatto). He started stuttering shortly thereafter. He'd had ice cream the previous day with no issues. Then we noticed it after mac'n cheese. Upon reflection, his grandparents brought cheddar duckies to snack on during the holidays. At that point we started eliminating it and did not notice a stutter. Sometimes after pre-school, when he was stuttering, I asked him how his crackers were and he would always say "orange" crackers. We avoided anything obviously "orange" and the problem went away in a number of weeks. It popped up again while eating chicken tenders (cheap ski lodge food) and then we started noticing that the breading in many packaged chicken tenders had annatto for color. The same with cheap vanilla ice cream. He's all good now though -- we were lucky.
This is really fascinating thanks so much for sharing. How did you discover the allergy if the only effect was stuttering?
We noticed he was more tentative and starting to stutter around the winter holidays, but could not figure out what the pattern was. Then one early evening before dinner we gave him a slice of organic, orange American cheese (milk, salt, enzymes, annatto). He started stuttering shortly thereafter. He'd had ice cream the previous day with no issues. Then we noticed it after mac'n cheese. Upon reflection, his grandparen…
Amazing! Congratulations on spotting it. How old is he now? Does the annatto affect him still?
Do you know if this is known in the scientific community? I am not a speech language researcher but I’ve never heard of allergy induced stuttering but the inflammation hypothesis really strikes a chord.
All of the comments about stuttering not occurring while singing and speaking other languages reminds me of this recent discussion about developing an alter ego to combat anxiety and boost confidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24197395
This seems to help overcome a similar psychological barrier.
We noticed he was more tentative and starting to stutter around the winter holidays, but could not figure out what the pattern was. Then one early evening before dinner we gave him a slice of organic, orange American cheese (milk, salt, enzymes, annatto). He started stuttering shortly thereafter. He'd had ice cream the previous day with no issues. Then we noticed it after mac'n cheese. Upon reflection, his grandparen…
Amazing! Congratulations on spotting it. How old is he now? Does the annatto affect him still? Do you know if this is known in the scientific community? I am not a speech language researcher but I’ve never heard of allergy induced stuttering but the inflammation hypothesis really strikes a chord.
He is 8 now and minor amounts of annatto, by accident, do not seem to trigger it. We taught him what to look for and avoid anything orangish in color without asking us. I do have a friend whose nephew throws up when he has annatto, but I haven't come across the stuttering connection. I should amend my comment above, we ruled out dairy as a cause given the milk, yogurt, kefir as well.