My remedy used to be to drink a glass of water with a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in it. I guess one time sugar wasn’t readily available, so I tried something different, drinking a glass of water by taking a continuous series of very fast, teeny-tiny sips without a break and without taking a breath. I might do 15 or so and it never fails to stop my hiccups.
I take as deep a breath as I can and hold it as long as I can. When I have to breathe, the hiccups are gone.
All of the remedies I’ve read for hiccups involve forcing your lungs to get by on whatever air you have in them long enough. An explanation of why the hold-your-breath fix works is that you’re basically rebooting your breathing cycle; when you get the hiccups, your breathing regulator gets all out of whack and taking a deep breath and holding it gives it a time-out. So, rather than dealing with the paper bags and the glass of water and the whatever, I just take a deep breath and hold it as long as I can.
This sounds like a good way to choke to death. Or at least that’s what I imagine will happen to me if I tried it.
But yeah, holding breath thing works for me too. Except for when it doesn’t. But then it usually does when i try again.
Holding my breath. I’ve read that hiccups are caused by the nerves to the two sides of the diaphragm getting “out of phase” and needing to breathe puts your brain into survival mode and resets the timing.
Take a deep breath and hold it. While holding your breath swallow as many times as possible before breathing again. I can usually get anywhere from 5-10 swallows. 95% of the time this will cure the issue.
Reading other people’s replies, I wonder if holding my breath is the most important part and the swallowing issue is not needed. Next time I will just hold my breath w/o swallowing and see if that works.
Take as deep a breath as possible, hold for a 10 count, exhale as deeply as possible, hold for a 10 count. Repeat if necessary, but usually only one or two cycles are required.
They’re just spasms of the diaphragm, so working said muscle to it’s opposite extremes will usually work them out.
“The best cure for hiccups, in the sense that it’s medically proven, rather than being mere folklore, and involves no drugs or surgery - is digital rectal massage: a finger up the bottom. It’s been used successfully in cases of chronic hiccupping at least twice, in hospitals in Haifa, Israel, and in Tennessee.”
Though there is no scientific cure to hiccups, I eat a spoonful of peanut butter. It works every time for me. If I don’t have that, nothing seems to work.