5. An inhaled or swallowed object
Believe it or not, sometimes your cough is caused by a small object or substance that you have inhaled and is stuck in your throat. Bigger objects are very easy to notice and, even if we don’t go as far as choaking, we can feel them inside our throat and try to cough, swallow and even vomit in order to clear it out of our throat. However, very small objects are extremely difficult to notice, like a strand of hair of a very small splinter.
However, they still trigger the coughing reflex because they stimulate the receptors located in our throats. In most cases, we can get rid of those objects by drinking some liquid that can wash it down, but if it gets stuck in our throat’s inner tissue, they can be more difficult to remove by yourself and instead require medical intervention.