What strategy is most effective for your stuttering? (Strategy #1, 2, 3, 4 or 5?)

What strategy is most effective for your stuttering? (Strategy #1, 2, 3, 4 or 5?) **Strategies**: 1. [**Valsava maneuver**](https://www.youtube.com/@stutteringtherapist/videos): Completely relaxing the abdominal muscles exactly when you are about to speak + speaking exactly when you breathe out + no gap between inhale and exhale 2. **Completely changing the way you speak**: [Articulatory Starting Positions](https://docs.google.com/document/d/147EQ28p-Anmg1D7fUcO34BgSEPGCIQbZY-KpwGPAnYQ/edit?usp=sharing) (ASPs) + completely replacing the controls from '*controlling fluency by waiting out air pressure against speech muscles*' to '*controlling fluency by opening the mouth*' + don't desire a feeling of a lot of air pressure against closed articulation + notice the absence of air pressure (it's a completely new speaking style) 3. **Visualizing fluency**: Imagine yourself saying the word + form a mental image of the movement of the speech muscles like position of your throat, lips, tongue, jaw and respiratory muscles + feel the sensations in your mouth and throat + match visualized movement with the actual movements 4. [**Prosody**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pKueBKtf4mMdVBRRVKr-csx_T9G6wiuKTpUO0JugSy4/edit?usp=sharing) **(a fluency law)**: Visualizing the rhythm, intonation, and stress patterns of speech. The goal is to focus on these things in order to distract yourself from (or move your attention away from) feared letters & stuttering anxiety (triggers), the need to correct speech errors (unhelpful strategy) and sensory feedback (disruption in the forward flow). Then, match the visualized prosody to the words that you want to say. Conclusion: Focusing on prosody can improve speech motor execution 5. **Instructing (a fluency law)**: 1. Calm breathing always (this also implies resisting headaches, heart issues, dizziness and other issues caused by anticipatory anxiety - regardless, no matter what) + 2. only speak if you are ready to instruct sending command signals to move speech muscles + 3. focus on the state of 'sending command signals' + 4. group label all different kinds of fear, doubt and negative feelings into one label: nervousness (not fear) + 5. really feel and experience this nervousness without avoiding/hiding it (to build tolerance, detach importance and disconfirm expectancy) + 6. If 'instructing to send command signals' fails, a) don't care about it, b) interrupt blaming it. Conclusion: don't control fluency by depending on thoughts/feelings (which makes overreacting, overthinking and convincing yourself redundant, as well as it reduces focus on a fight, flight and freeze response). Because 'instructing to send command signals' does not include any **feeling** or **thought**, it's solely **doing**. Homework: I'd like to give you homework to tryout the 5 strategies. Then keep us updated what strategy is most effective for you. Every person who stutters has different beliefs, experiences, neurological and environmental differences and are in a different phase. Again, I want to emphasize that this is a wonderful community and I hope that more people will read about these [research](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22stuttering%22+%22research%22+%222022%22+%22planning%22+%22execution%22) studies and share reviews about them ​ **Question: What strategy is most effective for you?** [View Poll](https://www.reddit.com/poll/12auh80)