Exactly How To Get Rid Of Baby Hiccups Without Losing Your Mind

Dear Sarah of four years ago. You're currently sitting in that cheap beige glider chair you bought on Facebook Marketplace. The one that aggressively squeaks every time you shift your weight. It's 3:14 AM. You're wearing Dave’s oversized college hoodie that smells vaguely like spit-up and stale coffee, and you're terrified.

Leo is tiny. Like, literal potato-sized. And he's currently convulsing with the loudest, most violent-looking full-body spasms you've ever seen. You're frantically scrolling your phone on 2% battery trying to figure out how to stop infant hiccups before his little head snaps clean off his neck, while your husband snores loudly from the other room.

I know you're panicking. I know you think you broke him because you fed him too fast or didn't burp him at the exact right angle. So I’m writing this to you, from the future—where Leo is now four and eating dirt out of my potted fern—to tell you to take a breath.

What Dr. Miller told me while I was crying in his office

You’re going to drag Leo to the pediatrician tomorrow morning on zero sleep. Dr. Miller, who's a saint and always looks like he needs a nap as desperately as we do, is going to hand you a tissue and explain what’s actually happening.

He told me it’s all about the diaphragm, which is that muscle under the lungs. Apparently, in newborns, it’s just super twitchy and uncoordinated. Like, it gets irritated easily. If the baby swallows too much air—which Leo totally does because he chugs his bottles like a frat boy at a keg stand—that air goes into the stomach. The stomach blows up like a balloon, pushes on the diaphragm, and BAM. Spasms. Then the vocal cords snap shut quickly, which makes that squeaky *hic* noise that's currently haunting your dreams.

Dr. Miller even said babies do this in the womb? Like, remember when you were eight months pregnant and you thought Leo was kicking you in a weird, rhythmic pattern for twenty minutes straight? That was him hiccuping. He said they do it to practice breathing. Which, honestly, makes no sense to me because there’s no air in there, just amniotic fluid, but whatever. Biology is weird. Anyway, the point is, he assured me it’s completely normal.

The great gripe water disaster of 2019

Let’s talk about the things you're going to try to clear up the baby hiccups, starting with the absolute worst one. Gripe water.

Your mother-in-law is going to drop off a bottle of this brown, weird-smelling liquid and swear it’s a miracle cure. So, in a sleep-deprived haze, you’re going to ask Dave to use it. Dave, who's clumsy on a good day, is going to try to squirt this sticky syrup into a thrashing newborn’s mouth with a plastic syringe.

It gets everywhere. Literally everywhere. It will dry on Leo’s chin like cement. It will get in his hair. Dave will drop the syringe on that nice cream rug in the nursery, leaving a permanent brown stain that we still cover up with a storage basket today. And the best part? It doesn't even work! The hiccups just keep going while Leo is now sticky and crying harder.

I asked Dr. Miller about it later, and he kind of sighed and said there's zero scientific proof that gripe water does a damn thing for a spasming diaphragm, plus it’s not regulated by the FDA. So we basically ruined a rug for a placebo.

Oh, and if the internet tells you to put a wet paper towel on his forehead or startle him to scare the hiccups away, please ignore it because scaring a newborn is just cruel and stupid.

Things that actually helped (sometimes)

If you're desperately trying to figure out how to soothe the spasms because Leo is getting frustrated, there are like, three things that occasionally worked for us without causing a massive mess.

Shoving a pacifier in his mouth. This was Dr. Miller's best trick. Apparently, the repetitive sucking motion helps calm the diaphragm down. Plus, sucking makes them swallow saliva, which somehow acts like a natural antacid if there's any stomach acid irritating things down there. I don't totally get the plumbing of it, but giving him a pacifier sometimes acted like an off-switch.

The awkward mid-feed pause. Since Leo was chugging too fast, I had to force myself to stop feeding him halfway through. He would scream, obviously, because how dare I cut off the milk supply. But I’d prop him upright against my chest and just rub his back for a few minutes to let the trapped gas out before it could push on his diaphragm. We had to burp him every two ounces. It took forever, but it cut down on the late-night hiccup marathons.

Just ignoring it. This sounds terrible, but sometimes they just don't care. There were times Leo would literally fall asleep while hiccuping, his little body bouncing every five seconds, completely unbothered. If he wasn't crying, I had to learn to just put him down and walk away. They usually stopped in ten minutes anyway.

The clothing casualty factor

One thing nobody warns you about: intense hiccups almost always end in a massive spit-up. The physical force of the *hic* just squeezes their stomach like a tube of toothpaste.

During one of these episodes, Leo was wearing a stiff, terrible outfit someone gifted us that buttoned awkwardly up the back. He hiccuped, threw up milk everywhere, and it got stuck in the tight collar. Taking that outfit off over his head covered his hair in sour milk. It was a nightmare.

That night I went online and rage-bought a bunch of the Long Sleeve Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuits. I'm telling you, Past Sarah, these saved my sanity. The organic cotton is stupidly soft, but the real MVP feature is the lap shoulders—those little envelope flaps at the neck. When Leo inevitably had a hiccup-induced spit-up explosion, I could pull the whole bodysuit DOWN over his legs instead of up over his head. No milk in the hair. Plus, the fabric has just enough stretch that it didn't warp when I aggressively tugged it off him at 4 AM.

Dave also tried to help by buying the Rainbow Silicone Teether, thinking that because sucking a pacifier helps hiccups, chewing a teether would too. Like, babe. He was a newborn. He couldn't even find his own hands yet, let alone hold a silicone cloud to his mouth. It’s actually a really great teether and Maya ended up chewing the hell out of it a few years later when her molars came in, but for a 3-week-old with hiccups? Absolutely useless.

Instead, I just kept the Happy Whale Bamboo Baby Blanket draped over my shoulder constantly. It’s technically a baby blanket, but it’s so breathable and oversized that I basically used it as a giant, incredibly soft burp cloth slash shield against the incoming hiccup-milk-volcano.

If you need to restock your stash of things that honestly survive baby fluids without getting scratchy, you can find a lot of forgiving, soft fabrics in Kianao's organic baby clothes collection.

When I seriously started to worry (and shouldn't have)

I spent weeks obsessing over whether the hiccups were a sign of silent reflux. You know me, give me a symptom and I'll spiral.

Dr. Miller finally laid it out for me. He said to only call him if the hiccups were happening alongside scary stuff. Like, if Leo was forcefully vomiting across the room, or aggressively arching his back and screaming in pain during feeds, or if he sounded wheezy. He said extreme irritability or dropping weight were red flags.

Leo was doing none of those things. He was just a chunky, gassy baby who drank too fast.

So, Past Sarah. Put the phone down. Stop googling. The hiccups are loud and they look scary on that tiny body, but he's completely fine. Give him his pacifier, hold him upright, and pray he doesn't throw up on your last clean pair of sweatpants.

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The 3 AM Panic Questions I Kept Googling

Do hiccups hurt my baby?
Oh god, I asked Dr. Miller this with tears in my eyes because it looks SO violent when they jolt. He promised me it doesn't hurt them at all. Adults hate hiccups, but babies barely register them unless it interferes with their feeding. If they're sleeping through it, just let them sleep.

Should I give him water to stop the spasms?
NO. Don't do this. My aunt told me to do this and I almost did, but newborns under six months shouldn't have straight water, it messes up their electrolytes and is really super dangerous. Stick to breastmilk or formula, or just use a pacifier.

How long is too long for a newborn to hiccup?
Honestly, Leo would sometimes go for like 15 minutes straight and it drove me insane. My doctor said anything up to a few hours over the course of a day is normal, but if one single episode lasts longer than an hour and the baby is super upset, maybe call your pediatrician just to check in.

Does my diet cause the baby's hiccups?
I spent a week eating nothing but plain chicken because I was convinced my spicy food was causing it through my breastmilk. It wasn't. Hiccups are almost always about swallowing air or eating too much volume at once, not what you ate for dinner. Drink your coffee and eat your tacos.

Will they ever grow out of this?
Yes! Thank god. By the time Leo hit about six months, his diaphragm totally chilled out. He still gets them occasionally if he laughs too hard, but that terrifying newborn convulsion phase passes. You just have to survive the fourth trimester.