 There are all manner of purported hiccup cures, everything from chew a lemon, inhale pepper, or our dog's favorite, a spoonful of peanut butter. Here's the technique. Besides, to try next time I get hiccups, supra-supra-maximal inspiration. You take a very deep breath, hold for 10 seconds, then breathe in even more, hold for another 5 seconds, then one final, tiny breath in, and hold for 5 last seconds. An immediate and permanent termination to hiccups was achieved. When I was a kid, I taught myself how to control my own hiccups using slow-paced breathing and I was excited to see there was finally a case report written up on it. It's really neat. There's a nerve called the vagus nerve that goes directly from our brain to our chest to our stomach and connects our brain back and forth through our heart and our gut and even our immune system. The vagus nerve is like the hard wiring that allows our brain to turn down inflammation within our body. When you hear about the mind-body connection, that's what the vagus nerve is and does. So there's been increasing interest in treating a wide range of disorders with implanted pacemaker-like devices for stimulating vagus nerve pathways. But certain Eastern traditions like yoga, qigong, and Zen figured a way to do it without having electrodes implanted into your body. Let me explain how. A healthy heart is not a metronome. Your heart rate goes up and down with your breathing. When you breathe in, your heart rate tends to go up. When you breathe out, your heart rate tends to go down. You can pause this video and test it out on yourself right now by feeling your pulse change as you breathe in and out. I'll wait. Isn't that cool? See, that heart rate variability is a measure of vagal tone, the activity of your vagus nerve. And so the game to play next time you're bored is to try to make your heart rate speed up and slow down as much as possible within each breath. This can be done because there's a whole other oscillating cycle going on at the same time that's speeding, then slowing your heart rate based on moment-to-moment changes in your blood pressure. And as any physics geek can tell you, all oscillating feedback systems with a constant delay have the characteristic of resonance, meaning you can boost the amplitude if you get the cycles in sync. It's like pushing your kid on a swing. If you get the timing just right, you can boost them higher and higher. Similarly, if you breathe in at just the right frequency, you can force the cycles in sync and boost your heart rate variability. And why are we doing that again? Because that allows us to affect the function of our autonomic nervous system via vagal afference to brainstem nuclei like the locus suruleus activating hypothalamic vigilance areas or at least according to the neurophysiologic model postulation, and I mean, duh! And why are we doing this again? It's not just a cure hiccups. Practicing slow breathing a few minutes a day may have lasting beneficial effects on a number of medical and emotional disorders, including asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, and depression, though in the US of A we've put it to use improving batting performance in baseball. Now to date, most studies have lack proper controls and have used fancy biofeedback machines to determine each person's resonant frequency, but for most people it comes out to be about five and a half breaths per minute, so a full breath in and out about every 11 seconds. When musicians were randomized into slow breathing groups with or without biofeedback, slow breathing helped regardless. Same with high blood pressure. You can use this technique to significantly drop your blood pressure within minutes. The hope is if you practice this a few minutes a day, you can have long-lasting effects to the rest of the day, breathing normally. Practice what exactly? Slow breathing. Five or six breaths per minute split equally between breathing in and breathing out. Should do it. So like five seconds in, then five seconds out. All the while, breathing shallowly and naturally. You don't want to hyperventilate. Little shallow breaths, but just breathing really slowly. Try it the next time you get hiccups. Works for me every time.