How to Get Rid of Hiccups

Video Transcript

"You have hiccups. My name is Beverly Bitterman, ARNP, health and wellness consultant, and I'm here to give you a few tips and strategies about how to get rid of those. Hiccups can be embarrassing, and I'm sure that's why you've logged on to see what you might do to get rid of them. Hiccups are caused because your diaphragm -- it's a muscle that's at the base of your lungs -- is not in sync. It's gotten out of sync, and it's, perhaps, spasming a little bit, and that causes your air to be pushed out of your mouth at inopportune moments and make that embarrassing noise. So the strategy is to get your diaphragm to relax. Now, for simple hiccups, it will go away on its own. If you're in a...anxious to make that happen, here are a couple things you can do. You can try actually just drinking some water. So doing things that cause you to swallow can be good, that cause you to not breathe for a little bit longer than you would normally rest in between breaths is good. So if you take a glass of warm water and just slowly drink it all the way down without breathing, that's a good way to get rid of hiccups. If you're still hiccuping, you can also try putting a little bit of sugar on a spoon and sort of dumping that towards the base of your tongue in the back of your mouth, and it's something about the granularity of that sugar and that texture on your tongue and then needing to swallow that also causes you to change your focus away from the hiccups into the task at hand, swallowing the sugar, and that may also help you. Anything else that you can do to relax yourself is a good idea. For next time, you may notice what your hiccup triggers are. Some people notice that if they drink excessively, they have more hiccups. I notice that if I eat something that's very dry -- like a dry toast, something like that -- without liquid, I can trigger hiccups in myself. So you may notice what triggers them and avoid those circumstances. And again, my name is Beverly Bitterman, health and wellness consultant, and I wish good luck in getting rid of those pesky hiccups."