To slow down when speaking, stop trying to slow down and change where you breathe instead. Treat every comma as a real breath. Deciding to "go slower" fails within seconds under pressure, but punctuation is a structure you already know, and it produces natural pauses without you having to invent silence.
Everyone who talks too fast has already been told to slow down. It is the most common note in communication coaching and the least useful, because it names the symptom and hands you no mechanism. You slow down for about nine seconds, the adrenaline comes back, and you are gone again.
Voiceover artist Stacia Carlton gave me the most usable answer I have heard, and it is not a technique so much as a place to put your attention.
Why does everyone speak too fast?
Because we are all trying to get to the end. Carlton put it plainly: "I think we are all in a big hurry to get our point out. We just have to rush to get to the punchline."
That is the honest reason, and it has nothing to do with nerves for a lot of people. It is impatience with your own sentence. You know where you are going, so the middle of the thought feels like an obstacle between you and the part that matters.
She is candid that it applies to her too: "I am certainly guilty of it in a social setting. I can talk a million miles an hour." The difference is that when it is time to communicate, she changes gear deliberately.
How much slower should you actually go?
Further than feels right, which is the whole point of how she phrased it. The words "much more than you think you should" are doing real work, because your internal sense of your own pace is unreliable in exactly one direction.
You are inside your own head. You already know the next sentence, so the gap between sentences feels enormous to you and normal to everyone else. A pause that feels like an eternity from the inside reads as composure from the outside. Speakers consistently underestimate how much room they have.
Which means the target is not "a bit slower." It is slower than is comfortable, held long enough to stop feeling strange.
What actually works: breathe at the commas
Here is the mechanism. Carlton's third piece of advice sounded almost too basic when she said it, and it is the one I have used most since.
"Commas are there for a reason. That is where we breathe, and it allows our thoughts to expand a little bit." Take every comma as an actual breath rather than a mark you drive past. You are not adding pauses. You are honoring punctuation that is already in your sentence.
Why this beats "add pauses": a pause is an abstraction. Under pressure nobody knows how long one should be, and silence feels risky when you are already keyed up, so you skip it. A comma is concrete. You have known where commas go since you were eight years old. You are not learning a performance skill, you are following a rule you already have.
And notice the second half of what she said, that it lets your thoughts expand. The breath is not only for the audience. It buys you the beat in which the next thought assembles itself, which is why breathing at the commas also reduces the fumbling and the restarts.
Does slowing down make you sound boring?
Only if you take the energy out along with the speed, and those are separate controls.
Carlton is emphatic that a flat read fails: "I can sit here and just read from the page, and it means nothing, and it sounds like nothing, and your entire audience will drift." Slowing down is not flattening. The goal is her other distinction, excited but not excitable: keep the engagement, take back the tempo. That is covered in more depth in why your tone of voice matters.
In practice, slowing down usually makes people sound more interesting, not less, because the audience finally has room to register what was said.
How do you hear your own pace?
You cannot, not while you are talking, and that is the real obstacle. You are in your own body, managing nerves, running ahead to the next point. This is why coaching works: somebody outside your head reports what actually arrived.
Short of that, record two minutes on your phone answering a question you get all the time. Do not listen for quality, and try not to wince at the sound of your voice, which is a separate and mostly irrelevant reaction. Listen for one thing: where you did not breathe. Mark those spots. Those are your commas.
One caution. Slowing down is a different fix from removing filler words. If your issue is "um" and "you know," pace alone will not solve it, and the specific method is in how to stop saying um in media interviews. Many people need both, in that order: get the tempo right, then clear the filler out of the pauses you just created. For the wider picture, start at how to speak more clearly.
If you have a presentation, an interview, or a keynote where pace is going to decide how it lands, tell us about it.
Quotations from voiceover artist Stacia Carlton come from a recorded interview with Jess Todtfeld, lightly edited for length. Stacia Carlton narrates corporate, e-learning, documentary, and museum work at staciacarlton.com.