What are some good ways to alleviate hiccups?
I've tried many things before, but in the past couple days I've found that eating a packet or two of mustard tends to get rid of hiccups.
What sort of tricks do you folks have?
Take a glass of water, bend over forward, drink from the opposite side of the glass while your head is upside down. Drink the whole thing. Cured!
This is it, although I just put the water in my mouth and bend over then swallow. Swallowing water while upside down = 100% cure.
Just quickly drinking a full glass of water usually does the trick
I used to do this with a straw while head was upside down. Worked really well when I was younger but haven't tried it recently.
I do the thing where you drink water while rubbing your tongue on the roof of your mouth. Success rate is pretty low tbh.
This will sound like a joke, but is 100% true.
The most effective, clinically proven, method to cure hiccups is anal digital stimulation. Finger your butthole. You don't have to go deep, unless you want to, just tease the opening though. You can have someone tongue punch your fart box as well because the method of stimulation doesn't matter and I am sure the research ran out of funding before testing alternative methods of stimulation.
It's all placebo. Whatever you truly believe will cure them cures them. Once you figure this out you can just sort of meditate them away.
I’ve got one that’s not placebo: Doing a whip it. One big ol’ hit of nitrous WILL CURE THEM.
Yeah, I'll bet most sedatives probably work.
Pro tip, if you are around someone with hiccups and you want to help them out, wait for their next hiccup, then immediately after offer them $10 (or anything you can provide as incentive) if they can hiccup one more time. Something about wanting it makes it stop.
Unfortunately, this probably won't work on you anymore once you've read this, so sorry about that. And it only works on the unknowing a few times before they become immune, but it's a neat trick that they will appreciate it when it works!
Here's a method that's always worked for me and others.
Get a glass of water, cool is preferred but any reasonable temperature is ok.
Take small, tiny, repeated sips from the rim of the glass, like an infant on a nipple, drinking and swallowing the water.
Do this for ten-twenty seconds and you'll be rid of them.
Easy! Just disbelieve them!
Say the following out loud:
Hiccups are a spasm of the diaphragm
A spasm is defined as a random tensing of a muscle
If the hiccups are random, they will not appear in a pattern
Therefore these hiccups do not exist.
If you hiccup part way through, you have to start over. Once you get through the whole thing, your hiccups are cured.
Ok, now hear me out. This isn't just a joke, I've had at least two people that I hadn't seen in years call me up and say, I need you to tell me the hiccup cure, now!
My best theory as to why it works, is that you're focusing on repeating the words fast enough, and/or it makes you breath irregularly and breaks the hiccups. Or maybe it's just the magical power of the mind! Oooooooooh!
Oh. It never works when you're drunk. I don't know why, but drink hiccups seem to be resistant to the method.
There's something about focus or attention. If I hiccup, as soon as I realize it's happening it stops. If I'm drunk I might not notice for a bit and the hiccups will continue until I can bring my will to bear on them.
You can also just memorize and recite this, comes in handy for more than just hiccups:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
I usually just breathe in as much as I can and hold my breath until I need another gasp of air. It usually goes away after two or three times.
Lying on your back and pressing your knees to your chest is another way to get them to stop that works for me.
The holding your breath thing works. You inhale as much as you can, which stretches your diaphragm out, and hold it as long as you can, even through the next few hiccups. Works like a charm.
In the order I try them, usually the first one works for me:
Hold my breath, cold shower, go for a run.
I hold my breath and "push" the air blocking my lungs from emptying with my mouth/throat.
Say this out loud:
"I am not a fish."
Repeat as necessary.
I just say it in my head to myself. It has had a near 100% success rate for the past year. I don't understand it, yet it works!
This really made my day. I'm a big fan of the ontogeny-filogeny thingy despite it often ends up disproved (e.g. recapitulation).
The other interesting theory, and the one I knew, was as a mechanism to empty air from the stomach, aiding milk consumption in mammals.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3504071/
I preferred yours.
I hold my breath for 2 breaths in a row. Works every. Single. Time.
Dying. Works every time first time and they never come back.
Hiccups come from a part of our brain that’s much less evolved. It’s the same thing that fish use to push water through their gills.
And just like breathing, it’s involuntary.
You just have to wait it out until that part of your brain stem remembers it doesn’t need to do that anymore.
Breathing is a little weird in that regard. It's a natural instinct that you don't have to think about, but when you do think about it, you can control it more or less voluntarily.
Hiccups are often way more annoying and way more on the involuntary side of reflexes.
I've researched hiccups before, and experts say that it's basically the reflex that's meant to start newborn babies breathing. After that though, it's basically an unnecessary vestigial reflex.
I'm no expert though, I just know hiccups are fucking annoying as hell!
A spoonful of peanut butter usually does the trick for me or my kids.
Same! It’s 100% effective for me. Never had it not work
Tablespoon of pickle juice. You're then going to have the urge to eat a pickle. Don't do it - they'll come back.
A shot of vinegar or lemon juice will also do it in my experience
Boo!
Did it worked?
Chug down a big glass of water on a single breath.
All the mythological cures rely on one specific thing: focusing on a task or overriding your brain’s autonomic systems with adrenaline (get scared). Don’t think about it and do something else with as much concentration as you can will. Sorry if you’re ADHD.
Yeah, I'm probably ADHD, and not easily scared. Hell, I handle snakes and spiders and shit sometimes. Good luck scaring me..
You'll never own a home or save enough for retirement. The entire planet is under incredible stress and we're literally making it uninhabitable for ourselves. Your tax dollars often go towards killing innocent people in other countries. You may have left the oven on.
If that didn't do it, I'm out of ideas.
Go for a run or cold shower. Get your heart rate up, similar effect.
Try to burp. Especially right after a hiccup.
I would add that you can swallow air to create the need to burp.
Not sure if anyone has said this, but hold your breath and swallow three times. The last one can be a little tough, but it has worked for me I'd say 90% of the time.
When someone else has the hiccups, cup your hands together (like you're about to pour water in them), hold them in front of them and excitedly tell them repeatedly (in a loud-ish, hurried voice like you're about to miss out on the chance of a lifetime):
" Quick! Hiccup in my hands! Hurry up! Do it! Hiccup in my hands!"
Gotta do it quickly and unexpectedly enough to surprise them. They'll either be so surprised that they forget the hiccup, or they will actually try to do it but be so focused on it that they won't be able to.
It's got a pretty high success rate for when I've tried it.
Hold my breath while thinking of a soothing song. Alternatively, actively try to hiccup.
Mouthful of water, then fingers in both ears and swallow.
For me I get a >90% success rate
Swallow a teaspoon of sugar. I read this when I was a kid, and it has always done the trick for me EVERY TIME I've done it.
My partner suggested this to me once and I thought, “nothing to lose” so I gave it a go.
Correlation does not imply causation, so I can’t guarantee that the sugar is doing anything at all, but every time except once I’ve had a teaspoon of sugar with hiccups, they have stopped.
To that end, I’ll be doing it as long as it keeps on seeming to have an effect.
This is actually what I was taught as a kid as well, somewhere around age 7. For me it only works around half the time though.
I figured I'd try something random when that didn't work. Honestly I hate mustard, but it does seem to help get rid of hiccups sometimes.
Swallow a pinch of salt. Don't let it dissolve on your tongue; just swallow.
The weirdest one I've tried that works is take your pinky finger and just barely, almost imperceptivly, rub your ear lobe with it. The only reason I can think of why it works is because you focus on not touching your ear too hard or too soft and just... Forget to hiccup? 🤷🏻♂️
Update: I went and smoked a bowl of weed. My hiccups turned into a spell of about a dozen sneezes. Now I'm good, no more hiccups or sneezes haha!
Have an upvote for the advice, but that ain't working for me right now. Sometimes the mustard trick seems to work for a couple hours or so, but that's hit and miss as well.
I dunno, guess I'm gonna pack a bowl of green and see if that helps.. 🤷♂️
There’s an evil part of me, a deep, dark, deranged demon inside me, that hopes the mustard packets keep working, but that it takes more and more each time.
get warm and eat a little snack
A lot of times hiccups are caused by your brain thinking that it needs more oxygen. So breathe deeply. Sometimes it works.
Just focus on your breathing, take conscious control over your diaphragm, that'll stop it from spasming. Works everytime.
I get terrible hiccups. Painful terrible. Have since i was a kid. And they make a weirder sound than usual, if I'm in public people always whip their heads around to look at me. Anyway, pickles. When I'm hiccuping nothing has ever worked but then, once I started making my own pickles, I can now just eat a single pickle and be good. They'll be gone. I'm just glad I like pickles now.
Drink a cup of sugar water. Works every time.
I actually learned this from an oncology nurse whose patients sometimes get chronic hiccups from certain chemo; the thing to do is have someone pull down on your earlobes while slightly cupping your ears forward,, and then you drink water slowly while they hold your earlobes. Works every time. I taught this to a friend who had trouble with hiccups after surgery and she says it saved her life.
Quick sips of water works for me.
Another technique that works only once when someone else is having a hiccup is to offer them a glass of water with a knife inside. The moment they see it, hiccup is gone.
That second one sounds fun. We used to do a lemon/lime slice dunked in sugar at a bar I went to years ago. The sweet/sour difference used to confuse the brain for just long enough for most people it seemed
100 yard sprint always did it for me
The only trick that worked for me was this.
Had been hiccuping for probably 5 minutes. Nothing working. Someone came up to me and just said “hiccup for me now” just waited for that hiccup. Kept asking for me to hiccup for maybe 30 seconds to a minute. Gone. No more hiccups.
He's a witch!
For me, it reliably works to drink a big glass of water. But probably just a me thing...
My wife believes that the secret to resolving hiccups is to "breathe as much air into your lungs as possible, squeezing your chest against your knees while crouching and keeping you breathe held; then lastly, standing up after 30 seconds."
She learned this from her Dad who has a mischievous side. To me, when she first described it, sounded like the steps someone would take to make themselves pass out unconscious. I guess it depends how fast you stand up. Is Lemmy able to settle this one for us?
I find that a sudden, deep diaphragmatic gasp and holding it for 20-30 seconds does it for me. But it needs to be harsh, otherwise it doesn’t work.
Nothing. Just wait, it’ll go away by itself eventually. Everything else is just a placebo.