Hiccups are something we all experience from time to time, but we don't really think about it until it happens.
They can be very annoying and hard to get rid of .
Nobody really knows why we get hiccups - it seems like there's no purpose to it!

So what exactly are hiccups, and why do we get them?

What happens in our body when he have hiccups?

The process of a hiccup involves 2 steps:
1. Your diaphragm, which is a muscle underneath the lungs that's active when we breathe, suddenly and sharply contracts.
2. Only 3/100's of a second later, our vocal cords and the so-called "glottis", the opening beteen them, suddenly closes. This creates the characteristic sound.
So during a hiccup we involuntarily take in gulps of air, only to block the air with our glottis, which hinders the air to travel to our lungs.

What triggers hiccups?

Everything that stretches the stomach can trigger a hiccup.
Mostly, they occur when we eat or drink too fast (especially fizzy drinks, since they irritate the diaphragm).
Other theories also suggest that getting hiccups is connected to strong emotions like being scared/excited, laughing or crying, or even a sudden temperature change that's following a disturbance in the nerve pathway from your brain to your diaphragm.

WHY do we have hiccups? What's the function of it?

Why would you suddenly intake air, only to stop it from entering the lungs?
Well... Scientists haven't figured that out yet, eather.
But there are many different theories, and 3 of them are quite interesting:

1)

Our ancestors weren't always walking upright - so it was quite likely for them to get some food stuck halfway in their throat. Some scientists suggest that it was the purpose of hiccups to help with this problem:
When a piece of food was pressing on a nerve in their throat area, a hiccup was being triggered.
The sudden gulp of air then created a vacuum which pushed the piece of food into the stomach where it belongs.
Since humans walk upright now, gravity helps us swallowing our food anyway, and we wouldn't need this technique.

2)

Hiccups might be a phenomenon that's beneficial to Babies being breastfed.
Babies in the womb already have hiccups, and toddlers have them a lot more frequently than adults, which supports this theory.
The researchers that believe this say that the baby could get rid of excessive air from the stomach through a hiccup - similar to a burp.
The spasm of the diaphragm would press the excess air out, while shortly after that the glottis prevents any milk from getting into the lungs.

3)

The last theory suggests that hiccups had actually developed long before humans even existed.
Scientists state that lungs as we know them had first evolved in the first forms of fish.
When they later moved to the land, they had to transform their breathing process and switch from gills to lungs.
This may sound impossible, but it's still happening with tadpoles all the time: They are born in the water, only using gills, and then they slowly transition to lungs and living on the land as they evolve into frogs.

So this theory suggests that hiccups originate from this transition of fish from living in water to living on the land.
With the hiccup, the fish would intake water and air, but then the glottis would stop any water from reaching the lungs.
This is backed by scientific evidence: Studies have shown that the process of respiration in amphibians is extremely similar to our process of having hiccups.

So ... how do you get rid of hiccups?

That's a very good question - which doesn't have an answer.
Although there are thousans of house remedies, from holding your breath to getting scared by someone else, scientists have yet to find a "cure" that reliably works everytime, on everyone.

But still, there are some suggestions that might help you, for the next time you struggle with involuntary hiccups

The reason why exactly we have hiccups is still being researched - but there are a lot of interesting studies that are plausible.

What was the longest time you've ever had hiccups, and how did you get rid of them in the end?

Images: 1, 2, 3, Sources: 1, 2, 3

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