How to Stop Chronic Burping: A Simple Open-Mouth Breathing Trick
When your body makes constant noise, the solution might just be sitting there with your mouth open.
I rarely write about such oddly specific bodily functions, but years ago, I was trapped in a state where I burped constantly. It absolutely destroyed the sanity of the guy acting as my cubicle mate. He thought I was being incredibly rude, just a lazy guy entirely unwilling to “hold it in.” The truth was, I literally couldn’t help it. My body was malfunctioning.
After a lot of dead-ends, I figured out it was a severe Vitamin B12 deficiency causing an issue with too much homocysteine. The moment I started supplementing B12, the burping stopped completely and I’ve been belch-free ever since. We are conditioned to just accept nagging, obscure health problems—especially when a general practitioner shrugs and tells us it’s just stress or reflux. You do not need to suffer in irritating, rumbling non-silence. There is almost always a solution if you are willing to look past the generic advice, dig into the research, and run some trial and error on yourself.
You do not need to suffer in irritating, rumbling non-silence. There is almost always a solution if you are willing to look past the generic advice.
What’s the Big Idea?
A doctor at the Mayo Clinic noticed a frustrating pattern. People were showing up with chronic, day-ruining belching that got misdiagnosed as acid reflux. They were taking proton pump inhibitors indefinitely and seeing absolute zero improvement. Instead of healing, these patients just resigned themselves to endless discomfort.
The culprits here are actually dealing with something called supragastric belching, driven by persistent aerophagia. In normal human terms: they are subconsciously swallowing massive amounts of air all day long. The air never even makes it to the stomach. It immediately hits the esophagus and is expelled right back out. During the study, researchers tracked this air flow using impedance monitoring, watching the air dart into the upper chest and right back into the world.
When doctors actually catch this mechanism in action, the standard advice is brutal. They might prescribe a muscle relaxant called baclofen. That drug technically works by stopping esophageal sphincters from relaxing, but it frequently leaves patients too drowsy and fatigued to function during the day. The alternative requires committing to weeks of expensive biofeedback or speech therapy just to relearn how to breathe.
Dr. David A. Katzka decided to test an embarrassingly simple mechanical override. If you physically hold your mouth open, your glottis can’t close. Without glottal closure, the physical mechanics required to swallow break down. By guiding just five patients with severe chronic belching through a handful of basic, open-mouth diaphragmatic breathing exercises in his office, he stopped their belching completely. Within minutes, the subconscious swallowing mechanism was disabled.
💡 In Plain English
Chronic air-swallowing is like a malfunctioning pump stuck on an automatic loop, which modern medicine often tries to fix by heavily drugging the system or surgically altering the plumbing. However, simply breathing with your mouth wide open acts like a physical doorstop that prevents the pump’s valve from sealing shut. By making it mechanically impossible to complete a swallow, this free behavioral trick instantly breaks the cycle and easily outperforms invasive medical interventions.
Why It Matters and What You Can Do
Most medical interventions require insurance approvals, pharmacy visits, or invasive procedures. Some patients with persistent burping even undergo intense anti-reflux surgeries, only to develop severe “gas-bloat syndrome” because they are still swallowing air but physically lost the ability to vent it. This behavioral approach entirely avoids that nightmare. It requires you to just lie down and breathe.
If you find yourself constantly burping throughout the day—specifically when you aren’t eating or sleeping—you can test Katzka’s clinic protocol on yourself right now.
Lie down on your back. Open your mouth wide.
Take slow, deep breaths from your diaphragm. Aim for about eight breathing cycles per minute. Keep your abdomen relaxed.
Do this for five straight minutes. Because your mouth is locked open, you are mechanically preventing yourself from subconscious swallowing.
If the burping stops, sit up in a chair and repeat the exact same wide-mouth breathing for another five minutes.
Patients who cleared those two simple steps in the clinic were sent home with instructions to keep practicing. Around the house, they were told to deliberately keep their mouths open. In public, where walking around with a gaping jaw might draw unwanted attention, keeping the lips just slightly ajar did the trick. If a sudden belching attack flared up during the week, opening the mouth wide for a few minutes worked as an instant kill-switch.
You gain the ability to fix a social and physical nightmare using your own anatomy. Within one month of this single training session, four of the five patients in the study had totally eliminated their belching. The fifth had two minor breakthrough episodes that she quickly crushed using the wide-mouth rescue technique.
What’s Next on the Horizon?
Gastroenterologists are increasingly recognizing that upper digestive symptoms are deeply tied to subconscious habits. This exact mechanical intervention could easily be tested on related issues like rumination syndrome or certain types of regurgitation. Both involve similar physical pathways where involuntary muscle contractions and air flow create distressing symptoms.
Larger trials are obvious targets. A five-person sample size practically demands a bigger cohort to see if this breathing technique holds up across hundreds of patients. Researchers also need to figure out if there is a subset of aerophagia patients who genuinely need pharmaceutical interventions, or if behavioral breathing tricks should just be the permanent first line of defense before writing a single prescription.
Safety, Ethics, and Caveats
Five people is a remarkably tiny sample group. The paper openly admits this was a pilot study. The results are striking, but they do not guarantee a universal fix.
This open-mouth therapy is strictly designed for people with supragastric belching—those who endlessly swallow and expel air. It will not do a thing for you if your burping is tied to actual gastroesophageal reflux disease, a hiatal hernia, or a dietary intolerance. It also wouldn’t have helped my own B12-deficiency situation, because the root causes were entirely different. If your burping stops when you sleep but improves when you do rigorous exercise (which forces open-mouth breathing), you fit the profile for this intervention.
Trying this protocol carries virtually no physical risk. The worst-case scenario is that you spend ten minutes doing deep breathing exercises with your mouth open, only to find you still have to burp. You don’t need to consult a specialist or buy any equipment to see if it works for you.
One last thing
I still think about how quickly that coworker judged me for a symptom I felt utterly powerless to stop. We are incredibly quick to attach moral failings to weird biological hiccups. If your body is doing something strange, treat it like a puzzle rather than a permanent curse or a character flaw. The fix might just be a specific vitamin, or perhaps, remembering to leave your mouth open for a few minutes a day.
Explore the full study
Simple office-based behavioral approach to patients with chronic belching by D. A. Katzka (Diseases of the Esophagus). [DOI: 10.1111/dote.12006]