There are many suggestions for stopping a sneeze before it takes place, after you feel it coming on, such as putting the finger on each side of the nose, and many others. But a half sneeze does not remove the cause of the sneeze, so it is much better to sneeze it out, and many people enjoy the after effects of sneezing so much that they take snuff into the nose to produce it. What Happens When I Swallow? The muscles of your throat act in the form of a ring when food passes into your throat. The food does not drop directly into your stomach. In other words, the action is not quite the same as when you drop a stone out of the window. When you do the latter, the stone hits the sidewalk or whatever is below at the time, with a smash. It would hardly do to have our food drop into the stomach, so the muscles of the throat are arranged to contract in rings which push or squeeze the food downward, and the food is passed from one ring of muscles to the other. It is just like pushing a ball down into the foot of a stocking that is apparently too small for it to drop down. You put the ball in the top of the stocking and then by making a ring of your fingers around the stocking you can push the ball down. When you swallow, you start the muscles of your throat to making these rings. The upper ring squeezes the food on to the ring below it and so on down to the stomach. What Makes the Lump Come In My Throat When I Cry? The “lump” which comes up into your throat when you cry is caused by a sort of paralysis of the rings of muscles in your throat. The muscles of your throat can make these rings or waves upward also, but it is more difficult upward than downward--probably because of lack of practice, as we say. When you have put something into your stomach that makes you sick and causes you to vomit, the throat muscles take the matter from your stomach and bring it back to the mouth in the same way, except, of course, that this action begins at the bottom. Sometimes when you cry, or lose control of yourself in some other way (you know, of course, that in crying you always lose control of yourself, don’t you) practically the same effect is produced as when you have something in your stomach that should come out. Crying, or the thing that happens sometimes when we cry, makes the throat muscles act just as if we were vomiting, and as the action is an unnatural one, when the ring or wave reaches the top of the throat, we feel the lump or ball as we call it. We feel the lump because the throat has been made to go through the motion of eliminating something in an unnatural way, just as your arm will hurt if you pretend to have a ball or a stone in it, and in throwing the imaginary ball or stone, you put the same force into your movements as you would if you had an actual ball or stone in your hand and were seeing how far you could throw it. Why Do We Stop Growing?