How to stop your hiccups

Listeners told us that eating baby carrots or telling lies can bring on the hiccups. Burping or kissing can make them stop. Um, what? (First published in 2023.) Guests: Tyler Cymet, chair of medicine at The Chicago School, and Ali Seifi, professor of neurosurgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [email protected] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:23Noam Hassenfeld?

  Brian.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  No, I'm.

• 1:24Noam Hassenfeld?

  What's your first thought when I say hiccups?

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Ugh, hate them.

• 1:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Do you get hiccups?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I get triggered when I eat spicy foods. It all started, I mean, you don't care.

• 1:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  No, no, no, tell me your hiccup origin story.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  It's not that crazy. It started in a galaxy far, far away. No, it started in New York City, where a lot of great dreams are dashed and destroyed. I must have been like 20 years old, was out with friends, you know? You get hungry after a night out and, you know, we went to one of those halal carts, which are delicious. And they always ask you, they have like the red sauce, which is like frickin' nuclear bomb of spice.

• 2:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I don't. It'll kick.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  And they'll ask for like one line or two. And I was like, give me two. I was young and invincible. And the spice hit me and I started hiccuping. This had never happened before and has kept happening since every time I eat something very spicy. And like the whole train ride home was just hiccuping. But now I want to go to the Thai restaurant and get the four chilies. But no, I just, it's too uncomfortable.

• 2:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  That sucks. I'm sorry.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Dreams destroyed, New York City.

• 2:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  But honestly, that story, it's not all that unique. Like, like it's tragic.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  But it's sort of how it goes with hiccups.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Everyone has their after midnight in New York City moment.

• 2:53Noam Hassenfeld?

  If, if not after midnight, New York City, so many people have their own, like, this is the thing that makes me hiccup.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I, I reached out to our listeners and I wanted to know what causes them to hiccup. And I wanted to play you a few of my favorites. To start, we had a lot of bread.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Bread.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  It has to be drier bread, like sourdough or baguettes or rye bread. I can actually tell when it's going to give me hiccups, the moment before I swallow. It's like an immediate reaction, swallow, then hiccup.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Brioche is okay.

• 3:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, brioche, totally fine, right? And one guy gets hiccups from baby carrots.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Full sized carrots do nothing for me. But if I eat one or two baby carrots, then I have these violent, socially disruptive hiccups for an extended period of time.

• 3:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's spicy food. That's a trigger for lots of listeners, not just you. We had hiccups after burping, after eating and walking. And then there were some really strange ones.

• 3:54Speaker 05

  Sometimes when I am washing my left ear, just my left ear, I hiccup.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  That's extremely strange.

• 4:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  It's really weird. And then finally someone wrote in and said his wife could always tell when he was going to tell a lie because he would hiccup.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  That's probably been good for their relationship.

• 4:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and taking all of these things together, things like spicy food and bread and ears and lies. I wanted to try and figure out if they have a common thread. And that's what I want to talk about on this week's show. Is there a grand unified theory of what causes hiccups? And if there is something there, can that help us figure out how to make them go away?

• 4:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  So to try and figure out what causes hiccups, I reached out to Tyler Simmet, who's a doctor. He's a professor. He's done tons of research on hiccups. And he says they're really interesting to think about because there's still so much we don't know about them.

• 5:03Speaker 06

  We don't know what causes hiccups. We don't know why people start hiccuping.

• 5:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  But that doesn't exactly stop patients from asking Tyler to explain what's going on.

• 5:10Speaker 06

  So people will come to us saying, stop my hiccups. And we have to redirect their thinking into why do you have hiccups?

• 5:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  Tyler will come in and be like, you know, I don't know. Like, maybe it's not the baby carrots. Maybe it's not the bread. Maybe there's some underlying thing. And thinking about hiccups helps us get to that, like, second level.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it strikes me like, you know, there's probably a difference between like a trigger and the cause or like the thing that's actually happening.

• 5:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and that's exactly what Tyler tells people.

• 5:41Speaker 06

  Humans look for proximate causes. What's the one thing that comes right before? In medicine, we have to teach people to think of a broad range of what it could be and not what it probably is.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Okay, so lots of different triggers, but the the truth of hiccups, the essential, like what what unifies the baby carrots and the spicy hiccupers? Like what unifies us?

• 6:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  So we can start with what we. Do know about hiccups.

• 6:11Speaker 06

  So a hiccup is when you have a nerve stimulating the diaphragm to contract quickly.

• 6:19Noam Hassenfeld?

  So the diaphragm is the muscle under your lungs that controls your breathing and that contracts?

• 6:24Speaker 06

  And then, once that happens, after the diaphragm contracts, the glottis closes.

• 6:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  The glottis is basically the opening on the top of the throat. So that closes and you get the sound.

• 6:36Speaker 06

  That's the reflex arc, and then it happens again anywhere from two to 25 seconds later.

• 6:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  And we have some ideas of why we might have this hiccup reflex. So I spoke to this researcher named Kim Whitehead, who noticed that babies hiccup way more than adults. And she thinks that it might be a way for babies, it might be a way for babies to learn how to control their own breathing when they are born. Like, the hiccup kind of forces them to get to know their own bodies.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it kind of forces them to like, oh, my, my chest does something, my lungs do something.

• 7:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, it's kind of you take for granted you know how to breathe, but maybe the hiccup is the way we learn.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:18Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then there's this other idea that hiccups may actually trace back evolutionarily, like, hundreds of millions of years to our last common ancestor with amphibians.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  And what the hiccup does for them is it allows them to gill breathe. So it'll close off the glottis, so they're not having anything coming in, and they're having the breathing going through the gills.

• 7:39Noam Hassenfeld?

  Tadpoles still hiccup, and it's basically a mechanism to kind of quickly close things off, prevent water from getting in their lungs.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Like a do not enter.

• 7:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Kind of response.

• 7:49Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, and our last common ancestor with amphibians was small, so the nerves didn't have to travel that far from the brain. But now that our bodies are so much bigger and they've changed so much, these nerves have this really long, circuitous route. So there are all these opportunities for them to get triggered, which leads to all these different kinds of hiccup causes.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  I'm trying to like, create like a visual in my mind about the system. And I'm wondering if it's a little bit like, I don't know. My apartment's like very strangely electrically wired and like there are like mini switches that control the same light bulb.

• 8:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  That actually makes sense. It's like our bodies are these old weirdly wired houses.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  You can have a stimulus from the brain, from the belly, from the lungs. And one of the things that we're trying to figure out is what else is associated with it?

• 8:43Noam Hassenfeld?

  So, given that Tyler is asking all of these hiccup questions, I wanted to ask him how these nerves and how this weird wiring system we have could be triggered by all of those things we heard at the top. Like, why would dry bread be that switch that makes you hiccup?

• 9:01Speaker 03

  For as long as I can remember, bread has given me hiccups.

• 9:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  Tyler says he hears this one a lot, actually. Like, dry bread is sort of a common hiccup cause.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  That's interesting.

• 9:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  But he thinks it's actually the way you eat the bread. So if it's drier, you might chew harder, swallow more air, expand your stomach more.

• 9:16Speaker 06

  When you eat bread, you may have liquid with it which expands. So there are more complicated responses that people aren't looking for.

• 9:25Noam Hassenfeld?

  Spicy food, you know, your hiccup thing, that can expand your stomach quickly.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  And, believe it or not, so can baby carrots.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Don't know what it is about baby carrots specifically?

• 9:34Speaker 06

  Well, I do think there's a good physiologic explanation. When you have baby carrots, maybe you eat them faster. Maybe you eat more of them, cause your stomach to expand. I mean, baby carrots are just carrots, but it's eaten differently.

• 9:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Then, you know, there's the left ear guy.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, just my left ear.

• 9:50Speaker 06

  We usually say that's Arnold's nerve, that's got a branch in the ear that does cause people to cough and can cause a hiccup as well.

• 10:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  And that can just, you know, like your old wiring in your house, that can trigger a hiccup.

• 10:03Speaker 06

  So that's just a anatomic oddity where the nerve's got a branch in the ear.

• 10:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then there's the lie person.

• 10:11Speaker 06

  If you're starting to get anxious, holding your breath a bit, if you get your diaphragm rigid, that could stimulate a hiccup.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  You're just tense? Like, that's the explanation?

• 10:21Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, tensing your diaphragm in a weird way could trigger these nerves. And, you know, I wouldn't discount anxiety or tension entirely. Like, once a certain thing causes hiccups for you, you might be primed. To hiccup again every time. You know, if you eat baby carrots and you hiccup because you ate a bit faster than, you know, the next time you have baby carrots, you could be tensing your diaphragm a bit and you could be priming yourself to hiccup without even realizing it.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Okay, so there's like a million ways to get this process happening. But why does sometimes it last for like an hour or something like, that's really frustrating. Like when you hiccup, when you're hiccuping and it's uncomfortable and you just wanna like, do something in peace.

• 11:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so I think we're in very uncertain territory here because of how complicated the body is. But if you go back to the anxiety or tension thing, the hiccup might actually be creating like a feedback loop.

• 11:20Speaker 06

  Once you're in that loop and you're tight and spasm and you're waiting for the hiccup and not doing anything to really truly stop it, you're actually bringing them on and keeping the loop going.

• 11:31Noam Hassenfeld?

  There's also a ton we really don't know here, like everyone hiccups in their own particular way.

• 11:37Speaker 06

  We know that people have their own intrinsic hiccup pattern. Some people every two seconds, some people every 10.

• 11:45Noam Hassenfeld?

  And to be honest, scientists don't really know why these hiccup loops happen exactly.

• 11:51Speaker 06

  People are fascinating. And I wish I understood better how they control themselves and how they get into this. But they do. A lot of times, once they've done it once, they continue to do it.

• 12:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  People can hiccup in threes, they might hiccup once, it might just be something they got used to.

• 12:07Speaker 06

  And once they accept that as their pattern, it becomes a sense of defining themselves and it continues, even if it's not conscious.

• 12:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  All of this ends up being pretty confusing, which is why Tyler's actually used hiccups as a teaching tool. He's used them to get medical students to think through problems that might seem straightforward, but they're actually a lot more complicated when you dig into them.

• 12:30Speaker 06

  So we've used a lot of fun topics like goosebumps, hiccups, yawns, butterflies.

• 12:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  And even though some of these things could seem harmless on the surface, hiccups that happen often or for a long time, they might. Actually be a sign of a deeper issue.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  There are a lot of people who are predisposed to them and they're living on the edge of having hiccups.

• 12:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Which might be because of some sort of underlying cause.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  Anxiety, lack of sleep can all contribute. We know that people who have diarrhea, who lose calcium, magnesium, selenium and zinc are going to have twitchier muscles that are more likely to set off a hiccup round. And again, I think hiccups are an end symptom from something else going on.

• 13:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I don't want to scare people here, like hiccups are often just, you know, you ate something spicy or you swallowed too quickly. But if you do keep hiccuping for a really long time, you might have something called intractable hiccups or chronic hiccups. So, you know, till now, we've been talking about what's called acute hiccups, which don't last for more than a day or two, usually much shorter than that. But there are hiccups that could be caused by a brain issue or a nerve problem or a tumor pushing on your diaphragm or something like that. And these can last for months or years.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  They do stop you from sleeping. They do affect your ability to have a good meal. They do change your appetite. So yeah, once it's two months, we're looking at some real changes.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  But overall, is there, is there anything we could do about hiccups? Or are we just forced to suffer through them until they go away?

• 14:00Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah. So for intractable hiccups, it can be really hard to treat. Like the best options are surgery or some serious medications that can act on the brain or muscles. But when it comes to acute hiccups, you know, it's kind of a wild west out here. Like everyone's got their own solution for hiccups. Like I imagine you have a solution, right?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Just gulping water, hoping for the best.

• 14:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I usually just do a spoonful of peanut butter. Works pretty well for me at least. But I did come across one idea that could be a universal treatment for acute hiccups.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Really? Something that works for everyone?

• 14:40Noam Hassenfeld?

  Potentially.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  All right.

• 14:42Noam Hassenfeld?

  I'll tell you after the break.

• 14:45Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 15:16Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 16:10Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 18:38Speaker 02

  Well, ain't nothing little water won't cure. We're back. Hello. And I mentioned before the break that there's this new idea that could be a potentially universal treatment for acute hiccups. Next into the tank is a solution for an annoying problem.

• 18:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  I don't know if you watch Shark Tank, but if you do, you may have seen this.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Guys, allow me, a doctor, to help. It's time to say goodbye to all of these silly tricks and instead say hello to Hic-Away.

• 19:07Noam Hassenfeld?

  So this is Ali Safi. He's the inventor of this hiccup remedy called Hic-Away. But he's also a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Texas Health Center in San Antonio. And he started working on hiccup treatments because he was seeing lots of patients who'd had strokes and couldn't stop hiccupping.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  We used to just give them, okay, just drink several cups of water or drink water upside down or some silly home remedies.

• 19:34Noam Hassenfeld?

  But these home remedies didn't really seem to be helping the hiccups of these patients, especially one guy who'd had brain surgery.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  And then when I entered his room to see the patient, I saw like he had cups of water on his table and he was keep drinking and to the point that he was throwing up. And he turned to me and said, "Dr. Safi, this is 21st century. You guys do heart transplant. You do brain surgery. You do all these cancer treatment, but there is nothing for hiccups. Is it the time that you guys, the doctors, should make something for hiccups?" And that was actually a trigger at that point for me.

• 20:09Noam Hassenfeld?

  So this patient had intractable hiccups from a stroke, like an underlying brain issue. So there wasn't all that much Ali could do about it other than maybe prescribe an antipsychotic. But he started thinking like, what about acute hiccups? Why are they still so hard to solve?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  And I said, you know what? Maybe I am the person should make something.

• 20:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  So Ali started by looking at the home remedies that people said worked for them, you know, like drinking from a glass of water, scaring someone.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  And then after a couple of months of research, I found, okay, most of these home remedies, either they're working on the phrenic nerve or vagus nerve, which are two nerves actually that control our diaphragm muscle and control our throat. And any of these home remedies, without the people knowing, they are triggering those two nerves.

• 20:59Noam Hassenfeld?

  Ali thought all of this was interesting, the home remedies, they were triggering the right nerves. But he also thought they weren't triggering the nerves in the right way.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  The problem is that most of these home remedies is hit and miss because the way the people do it, they don't trigger them enough.

• 21:16Noam Hassenfeld?

  He thought if you could get the diaphragm to contract enough, it could interrupt the spasm and then you might be able to short circuit this hiccup loop.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Is it kind of like a cramp? Like if my foot cramps up, I gotta like, you know?

• 21:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, like when you're cramping.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Engage the muscle.

• 21:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, you flex the muscle enough and then you won't keep cramping up. So he used some machines in his lab to try and measure exactly how hard you'd need to suck on a straw to trigger your diaphragm enough.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  Like sucking pressure, like I need to.

• 21:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly, exactly. Like how much sucking pressure you need. And he got to 100 centimeters of water pressure, which is essentially the amount of pressure you need to drink water through 100 centimeter long straw.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:01Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, imagine a one meter long straw in a glass of water and how hard you would have to, you know, engage your diaphragm to suck water through that straw.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  That's not a straw I really want to use.

• 22:13Noam Hassenfeld?

  No, and, and that's exactly what Ali was thinking. Like, okay, this is going to be a problem. How do I get people to keep a meter long straw in their house for whenever they get hiccups? So he, he got creative because he realized that if you change the size of the openings on each end of the straw, you can change the amount of pressure you need to use.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Wait, so if you can, if you like change, if you make a smaller opening, it becomes harder to suck?

• 22:38Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly. That generates enough pressure to trigger your diaphragm, which contracts the muscle and short circuits this loop.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Sounds nice. Does, does it work?

• 22:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, so Ali says it works. They, they did a trial on a couple hundred people.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  So we gave this device and they tested for four months. And we asked them to compare this with, uh, home remedies that they have been done in the past.

• 23:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  So this definitely isn't a perfect study. Like Ali was basically asking people to compare his straw to whatever home remedy they used. So there's a lot of variability there. You know, lots of people don't have this ready-made cure that works for them.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, ideally if this was like a medical intervention, you would give some people the hiccup away. And then you'd give some people like a straw that kind of looks like the hiccup away.

• 23:30Noam Hassenfeld?

  So he did do something sort of like. That he gave some patients straws that looked like hickaways without the right pressure stuff. And he says it didn't work for them.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Oh, that's

• 23:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  But that wasn't included in the study. That was just sort of anecdotal. And the study didn't actually have a control group. So that's a pretty big limitation here. Still, Ali says he did get some interesting initial results.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  So then we collected this after four months, and we came up with 92% better effectiveness of this device as compared to any home remedies. And then we published this result in JAMA, which is Journal of American Medical Association. All right. I mean, the science editor in me must point out that it's not great look to do your own research on a product you have a financial stake in.

• 24:26Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yep, very true.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Which isn't to say it's wrong, but just like this happens all the time where like, you know, companies will sponsor research for their product. So cranberry companies will sponsor research into the health effects of cranberries.

• 24:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  Right, right.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  And the results tend to like be aligned with what would make the product look good.

• 24:48Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, the cranberry study isn't normally going to say, don't eat cranberries.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's definitely a big grain of salt there.

• 24:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah, I think there's reason to be skeptical here. Like, ideally, we'd want some independent researcher without a financial stake here to do a study on this.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:04Noam Hassenfeld?

  But if we move past the specific product itself and just focus on the mechanism here of, you know, super flexing the diaphragm through suction. I did run it by Tyler, the doctor we heard in the first half of the show, and he thinks it makes sense.

• 25:17Speaker 06

  So it looked like it was a nice way of getting people to actively and strongly and efficiently close their glottis and contract their diaphragm.

• 25:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  But there's two things to keep in mind here. We really don't know how well this would work on long term intractable hiccups. Like, it might give some temporary relief, but if you really want to get at the Underlying cause, you're going to need more serious medication or maybe even surgery.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  So we haven't completely cracked the code of what's an easy hiccup solution for everyone.

• 25:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah. And then the second thing to keep in mind is that even if you take these claims at face value that the hiccup really works on acute hiccups, Tyler basically just said this isn't a perfect cure.

• 26:01Speaker 06

  It's overriding the hiccup as opposed to preventing or stopping the cause.

• 26:06Noam Hassenfeld?

  This only works once a hiccup starts.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would want to prevent them.

• 26:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Exactly. This is not preventing hiccups. This is just, okay, you can break your hiccup loop, but they're gonna come back. So Ali's straw, it makes sense physiologically. It's got real potential, but I don't really think the research here is airtight enough to be like, okay, everyone stop using the home remedies that work for you. And these home remedies, you know, they're not exactly standardized, but they do really work. And they have these really interesting approaches that target the nerves of the diaphragm in so many different ways. So I wanted to hear what kind of creative treatments our listeners like to use and how they might trigger the hiccup nerves or the diaphragm.

• 26:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  You fill up your lungs and then you take another sip of air for good measure. Like then you hold it for as long as you can, and then you let it out as slow as you can. So I checked with Tyler to see if this remedy makes sense.

• 27:03Speaker 06

  So expand your diaphragm, stop it from being able to contract on its own, and then dare it to contract. I like it. Place a steel table knife in a glass of water and drink the water with the flat side

• 27:16Speaker 02

  of the knife resting on your forehead. What?

• 27:19Speaker 06

  Okay. So that could be awareness of what's going on by using a one piece that gives you vibrations and will let you know when it's about to start.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  I got hiccups. My husband felt bad for me and was like, come here and gave me a kiss. And after doing so, I realized my hiccups went away.

• 27:41Speaker 06

  Have to study that one more. But I'm thinking when you pucker up and try and kiss, you're also closing your glottis.

• 27:47Noam Hassenfeld?

  And then there's focus. Like, a lot of listeners actually use my favorite hiccup cure.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Just eat a spoonful of peanut butter.

• 27:55Noam Hassenfeld?

  So I thought this one was really about sticking up your throat to stop a hiccup. But Tyler says that the stickiness might just get you to be conscious of all the parts of your body you're not usually aware of.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  When you're focusing on what's going on and you know your pattern of hiccups, the peanut butter is gonna make you tighten some muscles. That may help.

• 28:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  But you also might need to do the opposite. Like, you might need to relax and unclench your muscles. And for that, distraction really helps. I had hiccups and a friend of mine asked me to spell a word backwards, and my hiccups stopped.

• 28:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  Overall, the thing that stands out to me here is that the remedies themselves are often similar to the causes of hiccups.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Oh, funny, yeah.

• 28:36Noam Hassenfeld?

  Like, tightening the diaphragm too much can bring on a hiccup, but contracting it exactly enough can make it stop. Too much focus can bring on a hiccup, but the right focus can make it stop.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Like, so much depends on exactly how much you do these causes and remedies. And because we still don't know exactly what would prevent a hiccup, it's kinda up to everyone to just keep stumbling around in the dark trying to deal with this mysterious ancient hiccup reflex with anything we can find.

• 29:05Speaker 06

  I mean, people will find great ways to get information about their bodies. This is terrific.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Once, when I was in high school, a student had the hiccups. And the teacher finally stopped everything and looked the girl and said, "Think of a green rabbit." To our astonishment, she stopped hiccuping immediately. Grab a tall glass of water and have ten small sips and two big sips. Try your best not to take breaths in between. It works for most people, I tell it to. Whenever someone has hiccups, I will ask them a question about the last meal that they have. And as soon as they answer, their hiccups will be cured. Put your elbows out really far and point two fingers together and sort of stare at the point between the fingers. It doesn't work if you bring your elbows down.

• 29:52Noam Hassenfeld?

  Allegedly, but it works allegedly. Take a straw and then plug your ears and drink as much water as you can without breathing. I swear it works. Pour a glass of water, light a match, put the match out in the water, drink the water, throw away the match. I tell my brain, all right, it's time to stop hiccuping. We're not doing that anymore. And my brain, I guess, listens and I stop hiccuping. So like a lot of young boys, I taught myself to burp on commands like

• 30:27Noam Hassenfeld?

  uh, uh, excuse me. Um, and I discovered this summer that when I make myself burp, it stops my hiccups.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  This episode was reported and produced by Noam Hassenfeld, edits from Catherine Wells, Meredith Hadenot, and me, Brian Resnick. Mixing and sound design from Christian Iella, music from Noam, and fact checking from Zoe Mullock.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Thanks to Erevis, Carson, Kent, Sam, Vanessa, Erica, Siavash, Jessica, Alex, Nicole, another Nicole, Miles, Sue, Ben, and Peter for sharing their hiccup stories. And thanks for the tons of other people who emailed in with stories, remedies, and amazing hiccup questions for us. We couldn't have made this episode without all of you. If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us. We're [email protected]. We'd also love it if you left us a review or a rating. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.

• 31:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  What do you got for spicy food?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Green curry, extra spicy.

• 31:41Noam Hassenfeld?

  How many chilies?

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Uh, all of them, all of the chilies.

• 31:44Noam Hassenfeld?

  All of the chilies.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  I even added some, like habaneros to this to like, I don't know, disaster.

• 31:50Noam Hassenfeld?

  Amazing.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Ooh, it's very spicy.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Am I gonna hiccup?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  It's usually like on the first two bites or something. It's very spicy, but I'm doing okay.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  What if trying to hiccup on purpose is like my cure?

• 32:12Noam Hassenfeld?

  I mean, honestly, that that works for a lot of people.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  This is very weird for me because I usually have like an immediate reaction to very spicy foods. And this is very spicy. Like I'm getting the sweats and it's not happening.

• 32:28Noam Hassenfeld?

  Well, now you know, I mean, if you if you are eating spicy food in the future.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  You know.

• 32:32Noam Hassenfeld?

  All you gotta do is pretend you're on a podcast, right?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Pretend I'm talking. Maybe it's you.

• 32:37Noam Hassenfeld?

  Maybe it's me.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  I think there's something to this. I think this is my cure. Imagining eating spicy food on a podcast.

• 32:47Speaker 01

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