Somewhere in your career, someone has played back a recording of you speaking, and you counted. Seventeen ums in two minutes. You winced, and you made a quiet vow to never do that again. Then the next meeting arrived and your mouth did exactly what it had always done.

The vow failed because it targeted the wrong thing. The 'um' is not the problem. It's a symptom, and trying to suppress a symptom while the cause keeps running is why willpower loses this fight every time.

What an 'um' actually is

Linguists who study spontaneous speech have long observed that fillers like 'um' and 'uh' don't land randomly. They cluster at points where the speaker faces a planning decision: before a hard-to-retrieve word, at the start of a new idea, at the boundary between one thought and the next. In Willem Levelt's classic model of speech production, we are building sentences while we speak them. We choose an idea, find the words, arrange the grammar and articulate, all in overlapping stages. When one stage runs behind, the output has to do something while it waits. The 'um' is the sound of the machine buying time.

That reframes the habit. Saying 'um' is not a sign of stupidity or nerves, exactly. It is a sign that you started talking before you knew where the sentence was going.

And it's a signal listeners actually use. Work by Jean Fox Tree in the early 2000s found that listeners process a word faster after an 'um' or 'uh', as if the filler warns them that something is coming. Research by Martin Corley and colleagues found that listeners were better at remembering words that followed a filler, which suggests it can sharpen attention rather than only irritate. None of this means you should pepper every sentence with them. It means they aren't the moral failing your inner critic says they are.

Why it gets worse in meetings

Two things in a meeting raise the load on that planning system.

First, you're being watched. Self-monitoring takes working memory, and working memory is the same scarce resource you need to find your next word. The more you worry about sounding fluent, the fewer resources fluency has.

Second, you often start speaking to claim the floor before you've finished thinking. Someone pauses, you feel the window closing, and you jump in with a half-formed thought. The opening 'so, um, I think...' is the sound of you assembling the idea live, in front of everyone.

Put those together and the pattern makes sense: the people who say 'um' the most in meetings are frequently the ones who care most about being heard.

Why 'just don't say it' backfires

If you try to ban the filler, you've given yourself one more thing to monitor, which adds to the load that caused the filler. Worse, the gap still has to be filled, so you swap in 'like', 'you know', 'basically', or a drawn-out 'sooo'. Or you stall with a repeated word. The planning delay doesn't vanish; it just changes costume.

The better move is to change what you do during the delay. Instead of filling it, let it be silent.

Silence is much less costly than it feels from the inside. A pause of a second or so reads to listeners as thoughtfulness. It gives them time to absorb the previous sentence, and it makes the next one land harder. The discomfort you feel in that gap is mostly yours. The speaker experiences a pause as longer than the audience does, because the speaker is busy and the audience is simply waiting.

The fix: shrink the chunk, then pause at the seam

Two habits work together.

Plan one chunk ahead, not the whole speech. You don't need your entire answer before you open your mouth. You need the first clause and a rough sense of where it lands. A useful target is the destination of the sentence, not the whole path. Before you speak, silently finish this: 'The point I want to make is ___.' If you can fill that blank, the words in between mostly take care of themselves.

Take your pauses at the seams. Fillers cluster at boundaries between ideas. So decide in advance that boundaries are where you stop. Say a complete thought, close your mouth, take a breath, then start the next. A breath is a perfectly good replacement for 'um' because it does the same job, buying planning time, without announcing it.

This also fixes a second problem: fillers tend to cluster in long, winding sentences. Short sentences have fewer seams to trip on.

Your next moves

  • Record yourself for two minutes today. Answer a question out loud, like 'What did I work on this week?', and listen back. Don't count the ums. Instead, mark where they happen. You'll likely see they sit at the start of sentences and before specific words, which tells you whether your trouble is starting or finding.
  • Finish the blank before you speak. In your next meeting, before answering anything, silently complete 'The point I want to make is ___.' It takes two seconds and usually removes the opening 'um, so...'
  • Practice a breath-pause in low-stakes talk. In a one-on-one or a chat with a friend, deliberately end a thought, breathe, and then continue. You're training the habit where the pressure is lowest.
  • Cut your sentences in half. Pick one meeting this week and aim for sentences you can say in a single breath. Longer thoughts become two or three short ones with pauses between.
  • Stop judging the recording by the count. Replace the question 'How many ums?' with 'Did my main point come through clearly?' Fluency matters less than clarity, and clarity is what colleagues actually remember.

The part nobody tells you

Almost nobody in the room is counting your ums. They're mostly busy managing their own, or worrying about their own turn to speak. What they take away is whether your point was clear and whether you seemed steady. A person who pauses and then says one sharp thing comes across as more composed than a person who never stops and says three vague ones, even if the second person never says 'um' once.

The goal isn't a flawless transcript. It's learning to be comfortable in the half-second where your thoughts are catching up with your mouth.

That comfort is easier to build when you can see your own patterns instead of guessing at them. Meetingmortem is built for that kind of quiet debrief after a meeting: what you said, how it landed, where you stumbled. If you'd like a gentler way to notice your habits without the wince of a playback, you can look around at meetingmortem.lumenlabs.works. Either way, try the pause this week. It costs nothing, and it may be the most convincing thing you say.