Some medications can help prevent motion sickness, such as those containing dimenhydrinate, meclizine or scopolamine. Golding also suggested trying to keep your head fairly still but added that it’s always a bad idea to read or look at devices, because you’re focusing your eyes on something that isn’t moving. (You don’t, however, want to focus on the ground or trees rushing by, because that movement is too fast to provide you with a sense of stability.) When we shifted my daughter’s booster seat from the side of the back seat, where her view was of my headrest, to the middle, where she looked out the front windshield and saw the car moving, she was much less likely to feel sick. The best way to prevent motion sickness is to look out at the horizon when you’re moving in a car, boat or plane – this helps to eliminate the sensory mismatch, because your eyes see that you’re moving, Golding said. One key tidbit I learned from my interviews is that it’s hard to alleviate motion sickness once it fully sets in on a given trip, so it’s far better to try to prevent it from happening or to take steps to alleviate it when it’s starting. But, of course, many adults experience motion sickness, too. The peak age for motion sickness is about eight – this explains my daughter – and susceptibility decreases over the tween years as kids’ bodies start to naturally habituate to and resolve these sensory conflicts. Kids do not typically start experiencing motion sickness until the age of four or five, if they ever do, because their bodies have to first build an internal model of what various motions should feel like, Golding explained. We then feel nauseated and start vomiting, ostensibly to eliminate these potential poisons from the body. When our perceptual experiences don’t line up with what is expected, “the brain goes, ‘Aha, maybe I’ve been poisoned,’” said John Golding, an applied psychologist at University of Westminster in London. Some researchers speculate that motion sickness evolved to protect us from poisoning.

(Similarly, virtual reality devices cause motion sickness because your eyes receive motion signals that your body doesn’t feel.) Other experts, including Thomas Stoffregen, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, argue that the body’s inability to stabilise itself while in motion plays a role. When you’re sitting inside a car or boat but still feel a sense of motion from the vehicle, your brain notices a sensory conflict and you start to feel sick.

Motion sickness glasses work