I also do silent blocks like you. When I do a silent block, I'm checking how much air is pushing against the parts of my mouth (like throat, lips, tongue etc) that make sounds. This helps me decide whether to continue speaking or to hold back speech. So, during my stutter development I learned a habit of measuring the amount of air pressure I feel against my articulators as a way to control fluency or manage stuttering. In other words, I wait out speech until there is enough articulatory pressure (caused by exhaling) and only then I start speaking. I actually need perfect **timing** for this way of speaking, for example, if I wait for 'air pressure' too long, then the articulatory pressure becomes too high, whereas if I am too impatient and already start articulating before I have enough air pressure, then I'd pronounce the letter /H/ instead of the glottal stop /A/ for example. **Negative effect:** The negative effect of adopting this speaking style is: when I experience anticipatory fear, feared letters (or when I'm tired or do two activities at once), then I'm unable to perfectly **time** the right amount of air pressure needed to pronounce that perfect glottal stop in the appropriate way. So, fear makes it harder to perfectly **time** this, which leads to perceiving a speech error and then I hold back speech (or I halt speech structures), in other words, I do a silent block. **Conclusion:** It may be more effective to focus on maintaining fluency by applying the control: 1. place your tongue (or other speech muscles) in a closed starting position, and 2. then move your mouth instead of measuring air pressure against your speech muscles. **Positive effect**: The positive effect is then that we don't need to apply perfect **timing** and therefore we make the execution threshold completely inactive and we don't block. Because we stop reinforcing overreliance on this sensation (of air pressure or articulatory tension) anymore to decide when to hold back speech. [This](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BgLAxQfrsxVtbiE3dfQKXaUcbpZAG8skFIQj319tKyw/edit?usp=sharing) post explains our '*speech appropriatness regulator*' clearer.