How to Stop Counting on Your Fingers as an Adult (Without Shame)

Let's talk about something many adults do but few admit: counting on their fingers. You might do it discreetly under the table when calculating a tip, or quickly when trying to figure out a date on the calendar. And often, it’s accompanied by a small, hot wave of shame—a feeling that as a grown, competent adult, you shouldn't need to rely on such a childish method. It's time to let go of that shame. Counting on your fingers is a perfectly natural strategy, but if you want to move beyond it, the path isn't about forbidding the habit, but about building a new skill: mental fluency.

Why We Use Our Fingers (and Why It's Okay)

First, let's normalize this. The reason finger counting is so common is that it's deeply wired into our brains. Neuroscientists have shown that the region of the brain responsible for processing numbers, the parietal lobe, is located right next to the region that controls motor function for our fingers. For our brains, the concept of "five" is physically and conceptually linked to the five fingers on our hand. This is known as embodied cognition. So, when you use your fingers, you're not being "bad at math"; you're using a natural, built-in calculator.

The real goal isn't to stop doing something that works. The goal is to build up a set of mental tools that are even faster and more efficient, so you no longer need to rely on the physical method. The word for this is automaticity—the ability to recall math facts instantly and without conscious effort, just like you recall the meaning of a word.

Building Mental Fluency with Matiks

You don't achieve automaticity through stressful drills. You build it through consistent, low-stakes, and even playful practice that rebuilds your foundational number sense from the ground up. This is where a tool like Matiks can be incredibly effective.

Many of the puzzles in Matiks are designed to train the building blocks of mental math. For instance, some quick visual puzzles might flash groups of objects on the screen. Your goal is to recognize the quantity without counting each item individually. This trains a skill called subitizing, which is a cornerstone of number sense.

Other puzzles focus on number bonds—the different ways numbers can be broken down and put back together. Through practice, you stop seeing the number 8 as a point on a line you have to count to. Instead, you start to instantly recognize it as 4+4, 5+3, or 10-2. This flexible understanding of numbers is what allows you to perform mental calculations quickly. For example, to solve 8+7, you might mentally do 8+2 (to get to 10) and then add the remaining 5, for an instant answer of 15.

Through the repeated, gamified presentation of these simple operations within puzzles, Matiks helps transfer basic math facts from your brain's slow, effortful calculation center to its fast, automatic recall center.

So, let go of the shame. Your brain is using a strategy that makes sense. But if you want to upgrade that strategy, the path is clear. A few minutes a day with targeted, playful puzzles can help you build the automaticity you need to finally make mental math feel like second nature.