The fastest way to stop throwing up is to let your stomach rest completely for a few hours, then slowly reintroduce tiny amounts of fluid. Most vomiting from stomach bugs, food poisoning, or motion sickness resolves on its own within 12 to 48 hours, but how you manage the recovery window makes a big difference in how quickly you feel better and whether the vomiting keeps coming back.
Give Your Stomach a Break First
Right after vomiting, your instinct might be to drink water or try to eat something. Resist that urge. Your stomach needs a grace period of a few hours with nothing going in. Lying still, ideally on your side, helps your body settle. Avoid strong smells, bright screens, and unnecessary movement during this window.
If you feel another wave of nausea coming on, try pressing firmly on the pressure point on the inside of your wrist. Find it by placing three fingers flat across your inner wrist, just below the crease where your hand meets your arm. The point sits in the groove between the two large tendons that run down your wrist. Press with your thumb and hold for a few minutes. This technique works well enough that hospitals use wristbands based on the same principle for post-surgical nausea.
How to Start Drinking Again Without Triggering More Vomiting
The single biggest mistake people make is drinking too much too fast. Your stomach is irritated, and flooding it with liquid will often trigger another round of vomiting. Instead, start with ice chips or tiny sips of water: about a teaspoon (5 mL) every five minutes. That’s it. If you keep that down for 15 to 20 minutes, you can gradually increase the amount.
Over the next hour or two, work your way up to slightly larger sips every 10 to 15 minutes. If at any point the nausea returns, scale back to the smaller amounts. Clear fluids are your best option here: water, diluted apple juice, clear broth, or an oral rehydration solution like Pedialyte. Sports drinks are fine in a pinch, though they contain more sugar than ideal. Avoid anything carbonated, caffeinated, or acidic (like orange juice) until you’ve been keeping fluids down comfortably for several hours.
What to Eat When You’re Ready
Don’t rush to eat solid food. Wait until you’ve been keeping liquids down for at least a few hours without any nausea. When you do start eating, go bland and simple. The classic BRAT foods (bananas, rice, applesauce, toast) are fine for the first day or two, but you don’t need to limit yourself to just those four. Brothy soups, plain oatmeal, boiled potatoes, crackers, and unsweetened dry cereal are all easy on a recovering stomach.
Once you’ve tolerated bland foods for a day, start adding more nutritious options: cooked carrots, butternut squash, avocado, skinless chicken, fish, and eggs. These are still gentle to digest but give your body the protein and nutrients it needs to recover. Eating small, frequent meals works better than three large ones during this phase.
Steer clear of anything fried, greasy, rich, or spicy until you feel fully normal. Dairy can also be hard to digest right after vomiting, so hold off on milk, cheese, and ice cream for at least a day or two. Very hot foods and drinks tend to trigger nausea more than room-temperature or slightly cool options.
Over-the-Counter Options That Help
Bismuth subsalicylate (the active ingredient in Pepto-Bismol and Kaopectate) can help calm nausea from stomach bugs and food poisoning. It works by coating and protecting your stomach lining. Follow the dosing instructions on the package, and note that it can temporarily turn your tongue and stool black, which is harmless.
If your vomiting is related to motion sickness, antihistamine-based medications like dimenhydrinate (Dramamine) or meclizine work by dulling your inner ear’s ability to sense motion, which interrupts the signal that triggers nausea. These work best taken before you start feeling sick, so they’re more useful for prevention than for stopping vomiting that’s already happening. They also cause drowsiness in most people.
Ginger is one of the better-studied natural remedies for nausea. Research supports daily doses in the range of 1,000 to 1,500 mg of ginger powder, typically split across the day. You can get this from ginger capsules, ginger tea made from fresh ginger root, or even ginger chews. It’s particularly well studied for pregnancy-related nausea, but many people find it helpful for other causes too.
Helping a Child Who’s Throwing Up
Children dehydrate faster than adults, so fluid replacement is more urgent. The same principle applies: small, frequent sips rather than large amounts. For young children, you can use a syringe to give about 5 mL of an oral rehydration solution (like Pedialyte) every five minutes, increasing gradually as they tolerate it. Avoid plain water as the only fluid for young children, since they need the electrolytes and small amount of sugar that rehydration solutions provide.
Once a child is rehydrated and keeping fluids down, continue giving maintenance fluids along with roughly 10 mL per kilogram of body weight for each episode of vomiting or diarrhea. For a 20-pound (9 kg) child, that’s about 90 mL, or roughly 3 ounces, of extra rehydration fluid per episode. Return to their normal diet as soon as they’re interested in eating. There’s no need to restrict them to bland foods longer than necessary.
Signs That Need Medical Attention
Most vomiting is unpleasant but not dangerous. However, certain warning signs mean you should get to urgent care or an emergency room:
- Blood in your vomit, or vomit that looks like coffee grounds or is bright green
- Signs of dehydration: excessive thirst, very dark urine, dizziness when standing, dry mouth, or going many hours without urinating
- Severe headache alongside vomiting, especially a type of headache you haven’t experienced before
- Chest pain, severe abdominal cramping, confusion, or blurred vision
- High fever with a stiff neck
For adults, vomiting that lasts more than two days warrants a call to your doctor. For children under two, the threshold is 24 hours. For infants, it’s 12 hours. And if you’ve had recurring bouts of nausea and vomiting for more than a month, or you’ve noticed unexplained weight loss alongside it, that pattern needs investigation even if individual episodes seem mild.