- Hey everybody.
Today I'm gonna talk with you about stuttering.
What causes it, and what can we do to help ourselves stop?
(upbeat music)
So like I said, today I'm gonna talk with you
about stuttering, and actually, and I have
my handy dandy DSM, as always, and my notes,
so that I don't forget anything, we don't actually call
stuttering stuttering when it comes to the DSM.
It is called child onset fluency disorder,
otherwise known as stuttering, and there is a great
website I found for any of you who are looking for more help
if you struggle with stuttering.
It's called stutteringhelp.org.
They have a lot of information.
A lot of the information that I have I found from there
as well as the DSM and other research that I did online
through the Mayo Clinic.
There's a lot of information out there.
So if you have someone in your life who suffers
from stuttering or if you yourself are struggling
and you wanna help others understand your situation
I would check out some of those sites, do some research.
There are some great print outs you can hand out to people
to help them better understand.
So just like my Tourette's video where I talked about
how it was a neurodevelopmental disorder,
stuttering falls under that as well,
and if you remember a neurodevelopmental disorder
is something that occurs when we're very young.
It's when we struggle with something early on
in life in our developmental years,
and they say neurodevelopmental
because it has to do with our brain.
Now I have some interesting statistics and information
about stuttering, and stuttering for I believe it said
yeah 80 to 90% of people have it by the age of six.
Now it doesn't come on all of a sudden,
like boom, I just start stuttering and I can't stop
and I don't know why and all of a sudden it just happened.
It's usually something that happens gradually,
and children don't usually realize they're doing it
right away, 'cause they're just learning to talk anyway.
They say the mean range of age for people to start
stuttering is between the ages of two and seven.
So, that's when we're really just developing our language,
our ability to communicate with other people,
and so we won't even notice right away.
It starts with a few words.
It starts with a few phrases, certain things we say,
but they find as we age if we struggle with stuttering that
we will try to get out of public speaking,
won't want to do it.
There will be certain words and phrases and sentences
we stay away from because we know that those words
and sentences or phrases cause us to stutter,
and can be embarrassing for people.
And so it's good to know that you're not alone.
Over three million Americans, and that's just in
the United States, and we know the world is much larger,
but in the States along three million people
struggle with stuttering, and the good thing to know is
that 65 to 85% of people who have it do recover from it.
Now I know that's quite a range.
When I read that I was like 65 to 85,
that's a big discrepancy, but that's good to know
that most people, a majority, over 50% is a majority,
do recover from it.
So okay, we stutter.
We struggle with it.
How did we get it?
Why do we have this?
Why doesn't everybody else have this?
And obviously when it comes to neurodevelopmental disorders
a lot of what we know is just from studying it
and researching it and following people along,
but we don't actually know what causes things.
Like I've said before a lot of this is theorized
because we can't actually look into a human brain,
probe in there, and see what's causing something
because it's a living person and getting in the brain
can be really dangerous and we can injure someone
and you know take away their memory or take away their
speech, and so people don't sign up for that, obviously.
But things that we do know that affect it are genetics.
If you have someone else in your family who has any type
of language disorder there are so many in here.
Speech sound disorder, language disorder as a whole,
there's stuttering, there's a lot of different things,
tic disorders, anybody who falls into those
neurodevelopmental disorders, if you have that in
your family you're three times as likely to struggle
with stuttering yourself.
So, number one is genetics of what causes it.
Number two is child development.
If you also have another language disorder,
I know a lot of kids when we're younger like my brother
went to a speech therapist to better enunciate his S's
and T's and the discrepancy between those,
and if we're struggling with something already
having that makes us more likely to stutter as well.
The third, and there are only four options of what
they think causes it, the third is neurophysiology
which really means that it's a change in our brain.
They've noticed and been able to tell through
I don't know if it's CAT scans or PET scans or what
but by looking at the brain they recognize that those
who struggle with stuttering in their brain,
it processes language differently than someone's brain
who doesn't stutter.
Weird, huh?
So it's almost like our brain is just wired to stutter
and so most of the people that have this certain you know
neurophysiological change in their brain
will struggle with it.
The fourth is family dynamics and this is one that
we can work on as parents, as people in a child's life,
as a teacher, and that's when you have high stress
or expectations on a child.
You live a very fast paced lifestyle,
with a lot of anxiety, because we know stress
and anxiety don't cause stuttering.
A lot of people think that it does,
and that's a common misconception.
But it can definitely exacerbate the problem.
So if we worry about stuttering and we are learning
to speak and our mom was like, get it out, what do you need,
we gotta go, we're running late, what are you doing?
That can cause children to stutter.
It can make it really hard.
It's really stressful.
They feel a lot of expectations to just perform
and speak quickly and get it out because we're late,
and that can cause stuttering as well.
So those are the four main causes that they theorize
for stuttering.
Okay, so we have it.
We realize that we stutter.
We know it sucks.
It's embarrassing.
We avoid certain words.
We're afraid to speak in public.
It's hard for us to maybe meet people.
Maybe you know people have teased us growing up.
There's a lot of things that can be hard with this.
So what do we do about it?
And there are a ton, I believe, I think it's
the stutteringhelp.org gives like 20 ideas
of things you can do, but over,
the ones that overlapped with the research I was doing,
the things that they recommend in the DSM,
the first one is obviously relaxing,
because even though stress and anxiety don't cause
stuttering it can definitely make it worse.
So making time for yourself, doing yoga, meditation,
practicing relaxation techniques where you clench
your muscles and you relax your muscles and you tense
your muscles and you relax your muscles,
and that progressive relaxation can really help,
and if you're going into what you think is kind
of a important work meeting or something that could
be stressful maybe do some of these things ahead of time.
Do some breathing techniques,
anything to help relax your body.
Now the next one, and this is something that
I remember my brother having to do when he was doing
speech therapy, is practicing speaking to yourself
in front of the mirror.
It sounds weird and I know a lot of you are like, Kati,
I don't wanna do that.
That sounds weird, and I'm gonna be embarrassed,
and I'm already embarrassed and blah,
but the more we practice with those difficult words,
those bizarre sentences that always cause us to stutter,
I know my friend Adam struggles with stuttering,
and there are couple words that he always says
he stutters on, like saying breakfast.
Instead of breakfast, it's b-b-break, you know,
b-b-breakfast.
So if there's a word that catches you every time
and you just can't get away from it,
start incorporating it into some sentences
you write out and practice.
Now they say 30 minutes a day.
I know that's a lot of time, but it's not something
you have to keep doing.
It's something that you can do
to help yourself stop stuttering, okay?
So, we're gonna relax,
and we're gonna practice in front of the mirror.
Now the third one is read books out loud.
And I know that sounds kind of silly.
You're like, why?
But it's the same type of thing.
We're practicing, and the cool thing about reading books
out loud is that the sentence structure and the sentences
and the words they put in them are completely random really.
It's not like you're picking them.
You don't know which ones.
It'll be whatever a normal, conversational book
would sound like and you're just gonna try out
different words.
You're gonna practice speaking.
So reading out loud can really help you
overcome that stuttering urge.
And the fourth is when you do stutter
let out some tension between those blocks.
When you start stuttering, go ugh, in the middle of it,
and then keep going, start again.
Because that build up of tension, a lot of people online
that were talking about it said they feel this build up
of tension like, it's so frustrating.
Let that out.
And then start again, keep going,
and that will help you stop the stuttering
from reoccurring, 'cause a lot of people said
that also when they start they find themselves
continuing to stutter as they continue to speak.
Once it's starts, it's hard to stop it from you know,
keeping going and popping up in other words
they never used to stutter with before.
And the last, the fifth tip, is being gentle with yourself,
and this is the most important.
Doing this is gonna take a lot of time.
It takes a lot of practice.
But like I said, most people recover from it.
We just maybe have to put in a little extra time.
If we're older, and we're still stuttering,
because they say that most people kind of grow out of it,
but not all of us do, right?
There's still a good 20 to 35% of us that don't,
and so what do we do?
We have to practice.
We be gentle with ourselves.
We know this is a process.
It's not perfection.
This isn't something that all of a sudden we created.
This isn't any error in you.
This is just something that your brain is struggling
to process in the way that it's supposed to,
and so we have to teach it, and that's the great thing
about being a human is we're teachable.
We can learn.
We can do things better.
So work with me.
Share these tips.
If you know that someone out there in your life
struggles with stuttering, share this video.
Spread it around.
The more we know what causes it and what doesn't cause it
and ways that we can help it, the less people will feel
alone and embarrassed, and avoid speaking engagements.
Even though people who stutter are not stupid,
they're not weird,
they're just as intelligent and just as wonderful
and capable of just as much as anybody else,
and we need to hear from them.
They need to speak up.
And on Stuttering Help, I think it's called
stutteringhelp.org that I mentioned earlier,
they list a lot of celebrities and different actors
and actresses who used to stutter and who worked
on it and used these tools to get better,
because we can overcome, and that's the amazing thing
about the human experience, right?
And don't forget to like this video.
Mental health topics are important.
We need to let everybody know, and we're a community.
So leave your comments below,
and don't forget to check out katimorton.com.