Stress Vomit

"My stomach's doing hula hoops around my ass."

— Stanley Goodspeed, The Rock

Stress comes in many shapes and forms. You almost kill a patient on your first day as a doctor. You find out your parents were never in love. You discover the world you thought you knew was never real. Your intestines are falling out of your belly-wound. You actually kill someone on purpose, whether in panicked self-defense or in a brief bout of murderous rage. Or your opponent is just that terrifying. Conflict creates stress, and stress (sometimes) creates vomiting.

Note that no nauseous event or spectacle need occur to precipitate a Stress Vomit, though a sufficiently gory and horrific sight will most certainly do it for some people. If any event or revelation causes high levels of anxiety in a particular person, that person will lose their lunch. Thus the trope can work two ways: it can reflect the vomiting character's lack of hard life experience (particularly in youthful or formerly sheltered characters), or in a grizzled veteran, it can indicate the scene is particularly ghastly.

This is Truth in Television; some people do respond to anxiety with retching (dry heaves) or actual vomiting, and in some cases it happens repeatedly, in a condition known as Cyclic(al) Vomiting Syndrome (CVS). In addition, the fight-or-flight response can often (but not always) involve vomiting as a side effect of the sympathetic nervous system entering overdrive.

This is often a Vomit Indiscretion Shot, and is sometimes depicted as Rainbow Puke or Waterfall Puke.

Super-Trope to Vomiting Cop, since cops are human too (well, mostly or formerly).

Contrast Nausea Dissonance.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Black Butler: Ciel vomits after seeing a mutilated corpse in chapter 9.
  • And again in chapter 34 after having flashbacks to his time in captivity.
  • He is prone to these anytime he sees something particularly brutal, or something that reminds him of his past.
• In Code Geass, Lelouch vomits after thinking of how he killed his half brother Clovis, and immediately goes to a bathroom.
• In episode 2 of Kotoura-san, this is the direct result of Hiyori's Poke in the Third Eye Mind Rape on Haruka, by intentionally pressing on the Trauma Button of a girl whose decade of emotional trauma just started to fade.
• Fruits Basket:
  • Yuki throws up after being stuck in a closet full of paint while he remembers bad things that happened in his childhood.
  • Kyo throws up some Bishie Sparkle after a stressful conversation with his father.
  • In the penultimate episode of the anime Tohru also vomits after seeing Kyo's released, monstrous form, in part because it smells like death.
• In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Simon's gunmen, Lagann, starts vomiting Spiral Energy during stressful moments Simon goes through after Kamina's death.
• Kodomo no Kodomo has Miss Yagi, whose stress and anxiety is usually portrayed in her needing to vomit in the toilets during breaks.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Episode 20 generates quite a lot of stress and subsequent trauma for Maya Ibuki, the sequence beginning at the start of the final third of the episode: first, Maya safely presumes that both she and her colleagues will either be eaten alive or disintegrated; then, hope she'd rejected resurges when Shinji returns in EVA 01 to save them from the beast; then, it dies when EVA 01's battery power empties; then, it returns when EVA 01 reactivates to protect it's pilot; finally, she witnesses EVA 01 overpower the beast and then devour it. She spews.
• Soul Eater has a comedic example in the anime. Maka's team loses a game of basketball, so as a forfeit she has to offer to spend the weekend with her Bumbling Dad. He's so happy at the prospect of unexpectedly spending time with his sort-of-estranged daughter he vomits.
• Near the end of the Bokurano manga, Jun Ushiro is faced with the extremely unpleasant task of killing everyone in his final opponent's universe one by one until he kills the final enemy pilot (whose death will result in his universe being destroyed and Jun's being saved). The poor guy vomits from the stress. But he does it anyway.
• Elfen Lied: Lucy tosses her cookies at the height of her emotional breakdown as a child: specifically when she finds out Kohta had lied to her about his cousin's gender.
• Karasawa of Daily Lives of High School Boys had one during High School Girls are Funky: Archdemon when he was reminded of Habara. Fanon takes it to be a permanent trait, seeing he might actually be phobic to her.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, Ed spends all night in the rain digging up the thing that resulted from the human transmutation because he's not sure if it was actually his mother, and winds up vomiting- either from the rain or the stress- after he starts to uncover it.
• In Death Note, Light does this in an alleyway after the reality that he's just killed two people sets in. It's implied that he did it in the anime adaptation too, during a flashback. And he nearly does it in the live-action drama at Sakota's wake, but manages to hold it down.
• In Pokémon Adventures, X, who's noted to be extremely empathetic and sensitive, pukes his guts out in front of others when given the news that Korrina has some degree of mental damage upon having her Key Stone stolen.
• In Black Butler II, Ciel has just had his eye patch stolen by Alois and is experiencing intense pain and stress as a result of flashback memories and is Hearing Voices. He wanders to a cellar and vomits.
• Early on Arachnid, Alice has spent about a month being trained to be an assassin and decides to practice on the girl that keeps bullying her. However, taking a life from a defenseless person turns out to not be so easy and she misses the execution by a hair before suddenly having a breakdown.
• Towards the end of Satou Kashi no Dangan wa Uchinukenai, when Nagisa Yamada finally manages to make her brother Tomohiko get out of their home, he throws up. It doesn't help that he's going out because Nagisa has told him that she's sure her best friend Mokuzu has been murdered. (She's right.)
• Berserk: When Guts sees a young girl he had been travelling with get killed, and her body subsequently possessed by a demon and beheading her father, he yaks a little.
• Princess Principal shows Charlotte doing this in a flashback to demonstrate how much pressure she was under being in the public eye all the time, especially since she's not the real princess due to a Prince and Pauper situation leading to a permanent switch and she knew being discovered could lead to her being executed.
• Black Lagoon: In the first episode, Rock vomited off the side of the boat the Black Lagoon company kidnapped him on when he found out his employers were selling him out to be killed in case their deal with the company didn't go out well.
• Haikyuu!!: The main character and volleyball player Hinata is shown to have a weak stomach and often suffers from diarrhea or nausea due to pre-match jitters (except for the second OVA where it's implied that his nausea was caused by car sickness due to Saeko's driving). Episode 5 had him actually vomit on his teammate Tanaka's lap during a bus ride to a volleyball match against Aobajōsai. It gets better with time.
• Happens multiple times in Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn:
  • Banagher throws up in the cockpit twice shortly after becoming the Unicorn's pilot thanks to the motion and the emotional stress of battle. The second time, he vomits while wearing his closed helmet (which we see covering his mouth and nose, which probably should have drowned him because he also blacks out, but he's fine.
  • When Banagher uses his Newtype powers to try and reach Loni Garvey while she's in the throes of a vengeance-fueled psycommu overload, she immediately throws up.
  • Riddhe also throws up from the psychic and emotional backlash of Marida's death at his hands triggering his own Newtype awakening.
• My Hero Academia:
  • A flashback to Tomura Shigaraki's dark childhood shows that when All for One and the Doctor told Tomura that he had accidentally killed his entire family while awakening his Quirk, the poor boy vomited from the shock and the fragments of memories that flooded in his mind.
  • In the same arc, adult Tomura also vomits after getting brief fragments of the above memories while badly sleep deprived and fighting multiple combatants.
• Sword Art Online: In the Phantom Bullet arc, Shino Asada, known online as "Sinon", suffers from such a severe phobia of guns that even holding a plastic model of a fictional raygun is enough to trigger a full-blown panic attack that leaves her doubled over and vomiting. Even making a gun-like hand gesture is enough to cause severe nausea.
• Cross Ange: Ange vomits when she learns the horrible truth that the dragons that she and her comrades had been fighting and killing were really humans transformed into dragons.
• Naruto: In the Chunin Exams Arc, after being subjected to Orochimaru’s killing intent, Sasuke is so terrified that he drops on all fours and vomits.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Heero tries out Epyon, and its ZERO System proves to be too much even for him to handle. He throws up in his helmet, while wearing it. Twice.
• Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: This is Leon’s standard reaction to actually killing people. He typically uses rubber bullets enchanted with sleep magic.
• Overlord (2012): When Arche's Aura Vision reveals just how powerful Ainz really is, she starts vomiting and crying in fear. She doesn't stop until Roberdyck casts a courage buffing spell to calm her down.
• Gunslinger Girl: The cyborgs are programmed to do this if they injure, insult, or try to challenge their handler. That Petrushka risked doing this to slap and insult Alessandro while confessing her feelings of love for him convinces him that they're genuine feelings and not simply a side effect of her conditioning.
• Time Stop Hero: Fury gets her revenge on the people who killed her family and raped her sister by summoning a golem to crush them. Kuzuno Sekai, who is from the modern world and is not used to killing humans, vomits. He then freaks out that his other companion, Niña, didn't have the same reaction and instead thought people getting squished was fascinating.
• Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time:
  • Piglette Pancetta is ordered to try to seduce Peter. As she had never even spoken to a man before, she vomits when talking to him.
  • Peter vomits when his sister Lucy reveals herself to be a psycho who happily confesses to murdering their father for abandoning their family.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: After the Yami Marik and Katsuya Jonouchi duel, Marik is so stressed out and drained that he vomits in his mouth a little. The English dub cut this scene out.
• Chainsaw Man In chapter 80, after thinking about how he was forced to kill Aki after he became the Gun Fiend, Denji pukes from the trauma.
• Kimi no Knife: Shiki goes to the bathroom to vomit after he hears the news report about Kazuo Yamashina's murder because the cold reality of it is too much for him to bear.

Comic Books

• Justified in Concrete, whose protagonist's alien body has no other way to express grief.
• Mary Jane has done this at least twice in the Spider-Man comics:
  • Once when Peter and Felicia told her their plan to find the kidnapped Aunt May involved freeing Norman Osborn from jail.
  • Another happened during One More Day after Peter tells her about the Deal with the Devil Mephisto offered them. Of course, since said deal involved wiping away their marriage from existence and any future kids are presumably a part of that, a common fan theory has that MJ may have vomited for a different reason.
• Defied by Inspector Bloch in Dylan Dog: he knows he's subject to this whenever he sees too much bloodshed and just happens to get involved with cases of violent murder far too often for his liking, so he always carries antiemetics and is quick to take some whenever needed.

Fan Works

• A Crown of Stars: In chapter 52 Shinji vomits when he finally realizes he is just like his father: he would destroy anything and anyone that threatened or harmed the woman that he loves. The realization that he is right like someone he considers a monster is more than he can bear without becoming sick.
• Advice and Trust: Subverted. During a scene, several classmates were trying to flirt with Shinji. Their actions were getting Shinji upset, Asuka jealous and homicidal and Rei displeased. So Rei — who was already suffering from intense withdrawal symptoms due to quitting a regimen of mood-altering drugs, and is pretending that it's because she's sick — refrained from holding down one particular strong bout of nausea as she stood up and moved to a prime position for "accidentally" vomiting on one of the offending girls, stopping their onslaught and giving the three of them an excuse to leave quickly.
• After meeting her former friend Don in chapter 16 of First Aid Kits and Deep Secrets, May freaks out so much that she goes home and vomits.
• In Power Girl fanfic A Force of Four, Andrew Vinson throws up when the titular heroine takes him for a flight a tad too suddenly and enthusiastically.
  Letting loose of a choice four-letter word, he yanked open the curtains, pulled up the blinds, unlatched the window, and stuck his head out. He still didn't see anyone. "Kara, if this is you—" he said. "And it better be you."
  She swooped down from just above his window, grabbed him under the armpits, and was off with him through the night sky before he could unleash a half-decent scream.
  Power Girl beamed at Andrew, who was as wide-eyed as a gangster hearing of an IRS audit. "I got a call back. Turns out I aced the interview. Dr. Ginsberg at UCC hired me. Isn't that fabulous?"
  "Oh, yeah," he said, gulping.
  "I was out with Superman the last couple of days. Luthor busted jail for the 4894th time, and I got to come along and help kick his butt. I think he'll stick to just Kal after his bruises heal!" She giggled.
  "Swell," he said, swallowing hard.
  "I'm so glad you reccommended me to Ginsberg, you little poop. Wanna walk me to work tomorrow?"
  "If I can," he said.
  Then he let go of his lunch and it spattered the roof of a Jamaican taxi driver's cab some 30 stories below.
  The guy didn't know how it got on his car, but he hoped he never run into that big a bird, ever.
• Child of the Storm:
  • Harry does so in chapter 2 of the sequel, after being forced to Mind Rape a group of Death Eaters to protect his friends.
  • Clark does so in chapter 57 of the sequel, after Harry casually kills a baker's dozen of ghouls. (Almost) Always Chaotic Evil they may be, but he doesn't like killing, they look all too human, and Harry looks all too much like him.
• Danganronpa: Paradise Lost: Shion Nanashi's reaction to the first execution is to rush towards the nearest toilet and vomit into it.
• Drakonophobia: Petra, who is the Dragonborn, does this in relation to her combination of reactions whenever encountering Dragons due to her phobia.
• Mentioned in Miracle Child — apparently Karkat, at one point, rage-vomited on Nepeta when he thought Gamzee was dead.
• Magna Clades: Steven does this near the end while he feels guilty over accidentally killing Zoisite and Zirconia.
• Once More with Feeling: In chapter 3 Shinji faces his father, calls him out and demands combat pay in exchange for piloting a giant robot and risking his life. He succeeds, but he was so terrified during the confrontation that after leaving Gendo's office he hurried to the bathroom and spent thirty seconds throwing up.
• Scar Tissue: Before the beginning of the fic Asuka had became highly unstable, distressed and paranoid due to the events of the series. Severely traumatized and unable to control her temper she lashed out at Shinji, hitting him and then feeling sick with herself for beating him. After eight months she goes too far and hospitalizes him. Feeling guilt-ridden and full with self-loathing, she goes to visit him, and Shinji asks her to leave for a short while... instead of demanding it or shouting at her like she feels she deserves. Asuka could not stand it anymore and ran to the nearest bathroom to vomit.
• In Supergirl (2015) fic Survivors, Kara is watching Star Wars for first time. When she sees the Death Star obliterating Alderaan, she is reminded of her own blown-up homeworld and rushes out to vomit.
  Instead she seemed rather resigned and asked to continue the movie. She only watched for ten more minutes until the Death Star destroyed the planet. Kara moved quickly, running outside and falling to her knees, vomiting the food she had eaten. The three ran after her, Kal El stumbling behind them. Alex knelt next to her, scared to death. She didn't think it was possible for Kara to vomit and obviously what had happened on screen effected her. She knew Kara's planet was gone but she had imagined it dead, scoured of all life, not broken up, despite what the blonde had done with the rock.
  "Please never let Kal see that movie." she whispered, shaking, then began hyperventilating.
• Roar of the LION: When she and Mercury uncover Inori's Mad Scientist Laboratory, which contains such delightful things as dead bodies in People Jars to be made into Wetware CPUs, Emerald is so horrified by the sight that she ends up puking her guts out.
• Thousand Shinji: In chapter 14, after waking up from a coma and hearing how everything had gone to Hell due to his scheming, Shinji threw up violently.
• In this parody of Steven Universe, Pearl of all people does this as Jasper mourns her Diamond, Pink Diamond... right in front of Pink Diamond herself, who had taken on the permanent persona of "Rose Quartz".
• Much Ado About Shakespeare: Love's Labours Won: Archie throws up during his panic attack, but we only read that he did, making it a Vomit Discretion Shot. But he also mentions in his inner dialogue that he sometimes wakes up in "a pile of his own sick" after a seizure or a panic attack. Poor guy, Rape as Backstory must be hell.
• Nerve Damage: Shirou vomits after he kills Shinji for being a murderer, when it sinks in that though Shinji was a vile human being, he was still his friend and Shirou just killed him.
• In A Prize for Three Empires, Carol Danvers reveals she killed an enemy spy during her time in the CIA, and she threw up after the deed.
  Warbird: You're not the only person in this room with blood on his hands, Cap. Or her hands. A long time ago, before I ever put on a funny suit, I was a CIA op. I did what I had to do. One of those things was doing a button woman from the other side. She'd killed 23 of our people, and I was supposed to be number 24. I don't regret shooting her.[...] I threw up after that one. But I waited till I was in private to do it.
• RWBY: Epic of Remnant: When Hassan of the Cursed Arm rescues a little Faunus girl from a racist attacker by killing him and then eats his heart, the girl vomits from the shock of seeing a man die before her eyes and then that gruesome display.
• Lost to Dust: Weiss Schnee vomits when her group finds a White Fang base with a lot of massacred corpses. Later, Yang Xiao Long has the same reaction.
• Leave Your Spirit: After cheating on Aang with Zuko, Katara vomits more than once. It's too early to be morning sickness, so it has to be from the stress.
• Communication Has Louise vomiting on her own airship after personally executing Wardes for being a traitor for the rebels to the land she is on her way to save.
• Kaede in Blackened Skies vomits after the first body turns up. Kirumi later cites this as proof that she couldn't possibly have been the culprit, as she doubts her ability to convincingly fake such a severe reaction.
• In post-apocalyptic Evangelion fanfic Orchestrating the Silence, Shinji is riding a bike out of the remnants of Tokyo-3 when he notices it is starting to rain. Then he notices it is raining LCL (essentially, liquefied humans). Shinji falls off his bike, crawls away and throws up into a scrub by the roadside.
• The Savior King, the Master Tactician and the Queen of Liberation:
  • Dimitri and Felix both throw up when they find out the truth about the Heroes' Relics (namely, that they're made from dragon bones), and Hilda comes close to joining them.
  • Later, Byleth is seen vomiting and her lovers Dimitri and Claude think it's due to this. It's only later, after she's sick again, that it's revealed it's Morning Sickness.
• In OSMU: Fanfiction Friction, Todd begins to vomit out of nervousness and does so multiple times upon being named The Mole for the Mobile Unit and preparing to meet with Basil Valentine and his henchwomen to find out what they're planning.
• This And That: After surviving her first encounter with an Abnormality, the Burrowing Heaven, Powder completely empties the contents of her stomach in front of Angela.
• The Season's My Reason: Rosemary is extremely anxious about Yui going missing, and after having one nightmare too many about it, the stress makes him throw up. He initially takes this to mean he's dying, however Nodoka explains the process to him.

Films — Animation

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: When April O'Neil tried to give morning announcements at her high school, she got such a bad case of camera fright that she let out a long stream of puke for all to see. The video went viral and was subsequently memed, giving April the nickname of "Puke Girl".

Films — Live-Action

• In Animal House, after Dean Wormer informs the members of Delta House that they have all been expelled from Faber College (as well as his notifying their local draft boards that they are all now eligible for military service), Flounder loses his lunch.
  Flounder: I can't believe I threw up in front of Dean Wormer.
  Boon: Face it, Kent, you threw up on Dean Wormer.
• Another Cinderella Story: Popular pop star Joey Parker meets a nervous male fan who vomits when Joey shakes his hand.
• In Any Given Sunday, Willie Beamen's nervousness at being sent into his first game^note after both of the more experienced QBs on his team are injured causes him to throw up in the huddle. In later games, he's seen throwing up on the sidelines before taking his first snap.
• Justin Timberlake's Establishing Character Moment in Black Snake Moan is him vomiting into a toilet, showcasing his crippling anxiety.
• Blue Iguana (2018): After Paul is covered in blood from the shooting of a henchman, he runs off to the bathroom, where he can be heard vomiting loudly. Later, when the rest of the group is covered in gore from Deacon's explosion, Eddie vomits into a sink.
• The Body (2012): Álex does this after seeing the wrong Javier Alonso in the body bag.
• Pro skater Mike McGill mentioned in The Bones Brigade: An Autobiography that he threw up during a competition in Texas behind the ramp due to the stress of losing the contest. This was back in the time when skateboarding was all about the contests and if lost, the skaters will lose their pro status.
• The Bourne Identity. Already in shock from the Mood Whiplash of events after Castel attacks them, Marie throws up as she's herded out of the apartment by Bourne and sees the headshot body of the concierge.
• Discussed in Coming to America. Azeem's mother tells him that the day she was to meet his father (who she was to marry) she was so nervous she became nauseated.
• In The Daisy Chain, the mother of a child Daisy drowns vomits.
• Dead Poets Society: This happens to Todd after discovering that Neil committed suicide. His fellow society members feed him some snow to help stop the vomiting.
• Deadpool (2016) has Colossus deliver a soaring, baritone, Russian-accented monologue to Deadpool about the virtues of showing mercy to the defeated enemy that Deadpool has at gunpoint. This being Deadpool, you can guess what Wade does instead. Colossus instantly vomits.
• In Death Wish, after Kersey kills his first mugger, he goes home to the bathroom and throws up in his toilet. He eventually gets used to killing muggers, however.
• 8 Mile introduces its main character, Jimmy "B-Rabbit" Smith vomiting in the men's room before competing in a rap battle.
• In Evil (2003), Otto Silverhielm, the Rich Bastard who has been mercilessly tormenting the protagonist, Erik, throughout the whole story, starts throwing up in fear, when Erik thoroughly turns the tables on him by confronting him alone in the woods without his usual Gang of Bullies to back him up.
• Fearless (2006): Huo Yuanjia has a massive battle with Qin, but Qin later dies of his injuries. The next morning, when Yuanjia is informed about the death, he vomits.
• Flirting Scholar: The main character, an incognito great painter, vomits after being forced to pretend to like his boss's terrible painting. Later the rest of the work crew has the same vomit reaction.
• Fragment of Fear: When Tim realizes his apartment has been broken into, he vomits from fear. The vomit lands on a cigarette butt left by the stalker, which he flushes down the toilet, realizing only later that this means less evidence to show to the police.
• Michael Haneke likes this trope. In both Funny Games and Time of the Wolf the mother vomits after witnessing home invaders shooting a loved one.
• In The Idolmaker, Guido suffers from such severe Performance Anxiety during his first show that a minute into the first song, he runs offstage and into the parking lot to throw up.
• In Killer Elite, Danny's team hires Jake, an inexperienced small-time criminal who promptly vomits after shooting both an enemy agent and fellow team member Meier in the head in a fit of panic.
• In Knives Out Marta throws up whenever she lies. Even lying by omission only delays the effect. Not the best trait for a character in a murder mystery.
• Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels: Eddy ends up vomiting after losing a rigged three-card brag game and owing local mobster Hatchet Harry £500,000, which he has to pay back in a week.
• Machete: One of Von Jackson's henchmen always vomits whenever someone is shot in front of him.
• The Matrix: While in virtual reality Neo learns that his entire previous life has been an illusion and most of the human race is enslaved by the machines. He can't accept this, and after returning to the real world he throws up on the deck of the hovership.^note Helpfully, this is a Written-In Infirmity as Keanu Reeves actually had food poisoning during the take that was used, which caused him to hurl on-camera.
• In Mean Girls, Cady's "word vomit" turns into actual vomit thanks to the stress of a combination of Aaron breaking up with her and Regina (Aaron's jealous ex-girlfriend) walking in on them together.
• Miller's Crossing. Tom Reagan takes Bernie Bernbaum into the woods to be shot, but lets Bernie go after he shamelessly begs for his life. However The Dane is suspicious and takes Tom to show him the body, declaring he's going to kill Tom if there's none to be found. Tom appears to be facing death with a lot more dignity than Bernie, when he suddenly stops and vomits on the ground.
• In Mister Roberts, the Captain does this into a wastebasket after becoming totally unwound during his final confrontation with Roberts, though the viewer only hears about it from the crewman who is watching the scene through a window.
• Played for Laughs in Pitch Perfect. Aubrey throws up over the entire audience during a group performance. Later on she does it again as part of a particular hilarious argument.
• In The Princess Diaries, this is used early on as evidence of Mia's social awkwardness. When she has to present her side of a debate in front of her class, she ends up bolting from the room to throw up. She brings this up during the rambling prelude to the speech she makes at the end of the movie, prompting the reporters present to nervously back away a little.
• Coach Boone does this before the first game in Remember the Titans. His nervousness is Justified as one loss will end his new coaching job.
• In Requiem for a Dream, we get this twice. The first time is after Marian sleeps with her therapist for money. The second time is while Tyrone is making prison food while the security guard mocks him (although in his case, he was addicted to heroin, so that might've had something to do with it.).
• In The Revenant, a character vomits when seeing the horrible wounds on the protagonist inflicted by a Grizzly.
• In The Rock, Stanley Goodspeed throws up when he's recruited to be part of the rescue mission, and told the full risks of going in.
• In Ronin (1998), after the party is involved in a shootout, Spence ends up vomiting, which one of many clues that he lied about his combat experience and is not actually an SAS veteran.
• In Rush (2013), James Hunt is seen throwing up before races.
• Saving Private Ryan had some of the soldiers in the landing craft losing their cookies on their way to the D-Day landing. Though the sea travel likely didn't help, anxiety about invading France to retake it from the Nazis doubtless contributed to their nausea. This was parodied (along with the rest of the landing sequence) in Conker's Bad Fur Day.
• Serenity. While on the planet Miranda, the crew learns a horrifying truth about the origin of the Reavers, causing River Tam to throw up.
• In the film 12, Nikita Mikhalkov's Russian remake of the classic 12 Angry Men, this happens to weak-stomached Juror Number 6 is bullied into changing his verdict to 'Guilty'. After an intense storytelling session he runs off to loudly vomit in the gym's bathroom.
• Wanda: Wanda does this when she and Mr. Dennis go off to rob a bank. Previously she was only passive company on Mr. Dennis's life of crime.
• In the fourth story of the anthology Wild Tales, Ariel throws up when his wife tells him she will make his life a living hell after finding out about his affair.

Literature

• Dean Koontz's Phantoms. As a monster dissolves Gordy Brogan's body, Sara Yamaguchi vomits into a nearby gutter.
• In Dangerous Spirit's "The Green Fairy", Sol gets extremely stressed after Carcy attempts to rape him, only to break up with him after getting saved by Niki. Sol then drives away Meg after she wouldn't get him more Absinthe, and afterwards, goes downstairs to eat a cold leftover steak, only to run back upstairs to puke it all back up. It's kinda sad, but gross.
• Early on in the 100 Cupboards trilogy, this is Henry York's go-to response to any frightening or painful experience. He gets better eventually.
• Several of these in the Deryni works by Katherine Kurtz:
  • In Deryni Checkmate, Sean Lord Derry is on a reconnaissance mission for Morgan in the town of Fathane when he's accosted in an alley by two men who try to drug him. He kills one of them outright in his fight for freedom, but he has to slit the throat of the injured partner before the fellow comes to and raises the alarm. Derry leaves the alley and resumes his drunk act, retching in a nearby gutter. Passersby thought him simply drunk, "but Derry knew better."
  • After his forces defeat those of Sicard and Loris at the climax of The King's Justice, Kelson goes in search of Duncan McLain. On seeing the extent of Duncan's injuries, Kelson is so lightheaded he must put his head briefly between his knees. When he assists the men treating Duncan by using his powers on Duncan's mind, the memories of Duncan's torture and near-execution combined with his present pain are too much for Kelson; Morgan takes over, and he is violently sick before passing out from exhaustion.
  • In the epilogue to The Quest for Saint Camber, we learn that the execution of Kelson's cousin Conall for treason went badly, partly because the executioner was unnerved at having to kill a Haldane prince, and partly because Conall himself flinched: "It had taken two more blows to end the matter—though at least Conall knew nothing after the first—and Kelson had been violently and wretchedly sick as soon as he was out of public view."
• In Going Postal, after Moist von Lipwig kills an assassin in self defense (which results in Ludicrous Gibs), the text notes that it would be the perfect time for a Bond One-Liner. Instead, Moist just becomes noisily sick.
• In The Buried Life, the first novel of Carrie Patel's Recoletta trilogy, junior Inspector Rafe Sundar is confronting minor villain Dr. Hask. Unknown to everyone at the site, Sundar's senior partner Inspector Liesel Malone made her way to the area and is in hiding. Malone is thinking of how to get Sundar away from Hask, before Hask's goons arrive, when an unnoticed guard sneaks behind Sundar and shanks him before slitting his throat. Malone, a veteran to dangerous gunfights, is so horrified that she can't even scream. All she could do is shake and then lean over to puke her guts out.
• Subverted in The Turkish Gambit, when Varya throws up after spending days bandaging the wounded and, to top it off, learning that her fiance attempted suicide. She thinks that it's just stress but it turns out that she contracted typhoid fever, putting her out of commission for weeks.
• Late in Lynn Shepherd's 2012 novel The Solitary House, protagonist and investigator Charles Maddox finds his housemaid vomiting in the kitchen, and he learns from another servant that she had been accosted while buying provisions at the markets and a package was added to her basket. The package proves to contain the decaying remains of the little finger from Charles's right hand, which had been forcibly amputated in an attack on him several days previously.
• Tamora Pierce's Tortall Universe:
  • In Song of the Lioness, Alanna throws up after killing for the first time, and after helping the wounded in the field hospital. When she says it makes her feel like a sissy, Jon confesses that it happened to him too. It happens again in the final book when she has to kill her friend and Rival Turned Evil Alex.
  • Keladry from Protector of the Small threw up several times after having to deal with heights in the first two books. She gets over it after having to climb down the tallest tower in the Palace (and possibly kingdom) in Page.
• In Chosen, Zoey repeatedly vomits whenever she hears shocking bad news.
• Part of Horatio Hornblower's seasickness when he sets sail is due to this. Invariably, preparing his ship for sea is a chaotic affair that requires him to refit the ship, advertise hopelessly for qualified seamen who'd rather be in the merchant service, buy the basic supplies of clothing to last the voyage, and usually requiring him to pawn some or all of his valuables to cope with the expense. When going aboard in Commodore, however, he realizes that his stomach isn't giving him the least trouble and puts it down to the fact that he's not beset by these woes—he's going aboard a ship that someone else (that is, Captain Bush) has already completed.
• Spenser throws up in Mortal Stakes after he's forced to kill two mob men in self-defense. Happens again in A Catskill Eagle when he's again forced into a position of having to kill a pimp in cold blood.
• In the Alternate History novel K Is For Killing by Daniel Easterman, a British intelligence agent throws up after killing an American policeman. The vomit is later analyzed and revealed to contain the ingredients of ersatz coffee, proof that the murderer landed from a submarine from war-torn Europe.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Daylen nearly gives in to his sexual hungers when Sharra comes on to him, but then realizes that he's essentially taking advantage of a sexually abused girl who thinks she has no other option. He becomes so disgusted with himself that it makes him throw up everything he'd just eaten.
• In Miracle Creek, an A/C blows hot air on Elizabeth's cheek, reminding her of how the muscle on the right side of her son's jaw was burned away during the hyperbaric chamber explosion. She vomits in her lap.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: Dudley, after the encounter with Dementors, promptly upchucks all over the doormat as soon as Harry gets him back home.
• Ernest from Eye of a Fly vomits into a toilet before his first date with Annie.
• Charles from Language Arts violently throws up in the playground when the class bullies sexually assault Dana.
• Joel from The Someday Birds vomits up his Twizzlers after his sister's boyfriend crashes their car and breaks his arm.
• Clarice from Blue Iguana has a childhood memory of watching her dad kill a snake with a shovel and vomiting in horror. As a teenager, she vomits after accidentally running over a frog, and later when she finds the iguanas killed or injured by an attack.
• Animorphs
  • In The Invasion, Marco throws up from the sight of Visser-3 devouring Elfangor...the sound of which alerts his Hork-Bajir bodyguards to the group's presence.
  • In The Visitor, Rachel tries to turn into a shrew for a scouting mission, which ends up failing when she discovers, to her horror, that smaller animals are harder to control. She later has a nightmare of herself as back as a shrew eating a carcass, after which she stumbles into the toilet to vomit.
• After Cheyenne from The Nowhere Girls tells Erin, Grace, and Rosina her story of being raped, she runs into the bathroom and vomits.
• Almost Perfect: After Sage comes out to Logan as trans, the transphobic Logan goes to the school track, runs about eight miles, and then collapses and vomits. When Mrs. McGarvy calls his mom to ask if he's okay, he tells her he threw up from exhaustion.
• In The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War, Adam vomits on several occasions after seeing dead bodies.
• In Haze, Madeline's abusive mother is enraged to learn that she visited a boy at his house. She drives Madeline home and leaves her alone in the locked car for several hours while she eats dinner. Madeline doesn't get out because the punishment will be worse if she disobeys. After her mother finally lets her out, she throws up in the garden.
• Safehold: During a conversation with Daivyn in Midst Toil and Tribulation, Sharleyan tries to put him at ease by remembering her days as a child-queen barely a year older than Daivyn is at the time of the novel. She comments that for her first few months on the throne, "I threw up before every council meeting". She tells Daivyn that if he feels like he needs to throw up, it's all right, but please warn her so she can have a basin brought in.

Live-Action TV

• Iron Fist (2017). In "Felling Tree with Roots", Ward Meechum goes to vomit when he walks in on his father using a hammer to smash out the teeth of the Hand assassins prior to disposing of their bodies. He grabs a trash bin for a receptacle, only to gag on his vomit on finding a severed finger in there.
• M*A*S*H: After B.J. first arrives in Korea, he faces a young Korean girl injured in a minefield, pinned down by guerilla sniper fire, and having to assist foot soldiers under mortar fire, all before he even got to camp; at one point, when he sees how badly a soldier had been wounded (and killed) by mortar fire, and the situation finally sinks in, he crawls over to a thicket of tall grass to vomit, while Hawkeye holds his head for him.
• Grey's Anatomy
  • ”A Hard Day’s Night” Meredith almost kills a patient through inaction. After a stressful moment, that patient is saved and Meredith endures the scorn of her attending physician and her resident. She rushes out of the hospital into the pouring rain to empty her guts tastefully into the bushes.
  • “Give Peace A Chance” In the middle of an extremely delicate operation to remove a tumor from a spinal cord, there is a tense moment where Derek thinks he has paralyzed the patient. It turns out to be a false alarm. He keeps his composure in the moment, but a few seconds later the stress catches up to him. He frantically instructs an intern to remove his mask just in time for him to throw up on the operating room floor.
• Horatio Hornblower
  • "Mutiny": A sailor from Hornblower's division falls down from a mast and gets smashed on the deck. His blood splatters on Midshipman Wellard, who promptly throws up.
  • Horatio is known to suffer from seasickness when he comes aboard any ship after being ashore. In "Duty", he's heard vomiting in his cabin. This is just before his wedding, though, so his stomach might have been unsettled due to cold feet.
• Sex and the City: Carrie throws up in the sink when she discovers Aiden's engagement ring. She finds it ugly and she's not very certain about their relationship. A reaction this strong surprises her though.
• Midsomer Murders: one character immediately starts vomiting when she learns the guy she's been banging through the whole episode is actually her nephew. He doesn't really react to that, given that he also just learned he's the product of Brother–Sister Incest.
• In a Flashback episode of The Mentalist showing Jane's first case with the CBI, before he even becomes an official "consultant," he nearly vomits after seeing his first dead body.
• On Night Court, Christine is so stressed out over whether she should accept a marriage proposal that she throws up in Dan's briefcase - we don't see it, but Bull figures out how to use his instant camera right then and captures it.
• Danger: UXB: Lieutenant Ash throws up after defusing his first unexploded bomb.
• Game of Thrones: As Stannis' invasion fleet sails up Blackwater Bay to attack King's Landing, a soldier in the hold throws up into a barrel already full to the brim with vomit.
• ER trotted this one out fairly often.
  • One of the most poignant examples was the usually hard-hearted Kerry Weaver—who has been an ER physician for 10-15 years—well beyond the point where she might be affected by gory injuries—throwing up after having just discovered two of her coworkers bleeding to death from multiple stab wounds and promptly spending the next 30 minutes trying to revive and stabilize them.
  • Another time, John Carter has an unanticipated reunion with the man who attacked and nearly killed him in a prior season. He calmly listens to the man’s explanation—he is schizophrenic—and apology, but then bolts for the men’s room where he splashes water on his face and takes some deep breaths before inevitably vomiting in the sink.
• iCarly: This may be Gibby's response to Mr. Howard giving him triple detention.
  • Likewise, after Sam threatens to come up ahead on Freddie in retaliation to handcuffing her to Gibby in another episode, Freddie claims he isn't scared. Cue Sam leaving and Freddie running off with a trash can, in which Carly surmises he's going to puke inside of.
• The Sopranos has an epic version in "No Show", when Adriana is pressured into becoming an informant for the Feds and suddenly blows chunks all over the conference table.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "The Body", Buffy throws up in her living room after finding her mother dead.
• The Wire has McNulty throw up while listening to this tape of fellow cop Kima Greggs getting shot during an undercover sting. Lt. Rawls then drags him away and insists it's not his fault, and if it were Rawls would be the first to beat his ass for it.
• A suspect in one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit did this after he learns he had a sexual relationship with a girl he didn't realize was his own sister. The vomit is specifically pointed at by Benson as an indication that his reaction wasn't faked.
• Bones has a snake version where Hodgins and intern Finn Abernathy stress a snake into vomiting up evidence it ate so Hodgins won’t need to kill it.
• The Night Manager: Suave hotelier Jonathan Pine (played by Tom Hiddleston) is forced to wait hand and foot on Richard Roper, an arms dealer who was responsible for the murder of Jonathan's Love Interest and has no idea who Jonathan is, while putting on his best customer service smile and pretending not to have any idea who Roper is or what he's done (and experiencing flashbacks to finding his dead girlfriend's brutally-murdered body). The second Jonathan is able to leave Roper's suite, he bolts to a staff restroom and vomits violently.
• Friends: In "TOW The Lesbian Wedding," Rachel exclaims "Oh god, I think I'm gonna be sick" and runs for the bathroom after learning that her parents are getting a divorce.
  • Monica, catering the titular lesbian wedding, had been making crude lesbian-themed jokes about the food she planned to serve. She misses Mrs. Green's Wham Line, and assumes Rachel's sudden nausea is a reaction to her terrible joke.
    Monica: What? It's not like they have nipples on them!
• Star Trek: Picard. In the episode "Nepenthe", Jurati throws up in a flashback after Oh shows her a Bad Future via mind-meld, then in the present day on La Sirena when they repeatedly fail to shake their pursuer because of the tracking device that Oh forced her to swallow.
• Young Sheldon: In "A Patch, a Modem, and a Zantac®", Sheldon becomes so fixated on proving that he's correct that he gets a stomach pain that a doctor diagnoses as an ulcer. Later, when George Sr. decides the only way to settle this for good is to drive the family to Houston so Sheldon can prove his intelligence to the people that matter, Sheldon gets carsick along the way.
• The West Wing has several examples of characters vomiting from stress.
  • In the first season, Mandy runs out of the room to vomit after learning the outcome of a hostage situation she had been confidently attempting to resolve peacefully.
  • The second season opens in the aftermath of a shooting attempt on the President's entourage. When President Bartlet asks where his daughter is he's told she can't speak to him because she's currently throwing up in the back of her limousine due to the shock. Bartlet later jokes that the Secret Service will probably charge him for the clean-up once the situation is over.
  • In the fourth season, Will Bailey, the new speech writer, exits the restroom wiping his mouth prior to the presidents Inaugural Address, which he helped write and has been stressing over for months.
    Toby: Did you throw up?
    Will: Yeah.
    Toby: About time.
    Will: It was my third time.

Music

• Eminem gives us the single most famous example in music history in the opening lines to "Lose Yourself", describing a rapper with stage fright:
  His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, there's vomit on his sweater already, Mom's spaghetti...

Professional Wrestling

• At the 2020 event The Horror Show at Extreme Rules, Seth Rollins and Rey Mysterio Jr. faced each other in a match where the only way to win is to gouge their opponent's eye. In the end, Rollins won, but as Rey was tended to by paramedics, Rollins threw up.

Roleplay

• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Barbra throws up after experiencing the trauma of the Mass Super-Empowering Event. Jacob has the misfortune of slipping in it afterwards, which kicks off their rocky acquaintance.

Video Games

• LittleBigPlanet
  • One survival level in LittleBigPlanet 2 has Larry telling Sackboy to bounce on the bounce pads no-stop without losing his lunch.
  • Well, speaking of losing lunch in LittleBigPlanet 3 during the Final Boss has Newton vomiting in a small boat with Sackboy even if he's really nervous. Really REEEEALLLY nervous.
    "Newton: (throws up) (looks down) The water is rising! We have to get outta here!"

• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: Old Snake has a stress meter, and if you kill too many people he'll throw up and have audio flashbacks.
• Spec Ops: The Line: Before the final meeting with Konrad, Walker, after being forced to run away from an assault by the 33rd on him and Adams (which the latter does not survive), throws up when he has a moment to rest.
• In The Thing (2002), your teammates do this.
• In the first mission of Hotline Miami, protagonist "Jacket" vomits next to the body of a man he just killed. Jacket is a war veteran, as revealed in the prologue comic, so it isn't due to him being squeamish towards violence.
• In Heavy Rain, Ethan will vomit if you make him kill the drug dealer during the Shark trial.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • In Shin Megami Tensei IV, after Hugo orders the Samurai to continue scouting out Tokyo for mystic relics even after the capture of the Black Samurai, Walter, heavily disgusted by this snippet of news, complains of "an overabundance of yellow bile that must be relieved" and leaves.
  • Persona 4's newbie detective Adachi throws up off screen upon seeing the body of the first murder victim. As he's the one who killed her, it's not clear whether he was faking it or it was a legitimate reaction to actually realizing what he had accomplished.
• In both [PROTOTYPE] and its sequel, the pedestrians may vomit if they see the protagonist in his full viral glory.
• In Outlast, Miles vomits after having two of his fingers gruesomely chopped off with a pair of bone shears, courtesy of the crazed Doctor Trager. In first person, too!
• At the beginning of Fable, the young Hero vomits in the street after being teleported away from the corpse of his father and his freshly-torched Doomed Hometown. His rescuer snidely says that he'd expected him to have a stronger stomach.
• In Resident Evil (Remake), Jill Valentine vomits in the toilet after being attacked by the zombie in the bathtub.
• in Oxygen Not Included this is one of the possible reactions Duplicants will have if their stress level gets too high. It creates a bunch of nasty "polluted water" that has to be cleaned up and will add to your other Duplicants' stress if they step in it.
• The Corpo lifepath in Cyberpunk 2077 starts with V throwing up in their work bathroom because of work-related stress. Namely, a big leak in Frankfurt that has Counterintel (the Arasaka division that V works for) scrambling.
• NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD: One of the worst endings you can obtain in the game begins from this. If Ame's stress level reaches 80 or above in Day 25, the remaining days will be automatically overwritten by a scripted event that begins from her stressing out from a stream and vomiting twice because of an influx of detractors against her. This leads to people looking up her personal information, trash talking her, calling her a whore among other things, and considering that she's not mentally well, it only gets worse and worse from there.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops: At the end of the mission "Executive Order", Weaver doubles over and vomits, having just helped Mason and his squad gun down an entire facility full of Soviet soldiers. Having one of his eyes carved out of his skull not long beforehand definitely didn't help.

Visual Novels

• In Higurashi: When They Cry, when Keiichi tries to pat Satoko's head after her uncle has been abusing her, Satoko has a complete mental breakdown, and in the process vomits all over the floor.
• In Doki Doki Literature Club!, after Yuri commits suicide by stabbing herself multiple times and her corpse is left to rot in the school for an entire weekend, Natsuki vomits all over herself despite trying to stop it by clamping a hand over her mouth.

Web Original

• Critical Role: In the episode "Homeward Bound", Nott accidentally blurts out part of Caleb's extremely traumatic backstory and snaps at him when he tries to defend himself, a sharp contrast with her usual gentleness towards him. This, combined with the extreme stress Caleb was already under, results in him vomiting on the floor and spending the rest of the session in silence with a Thousand-Yard Stare.
• In Jacksfilms' "Dubstep Solves Everything" video, Jack's convulsing to his own dubstep noises makes the girl he's coming onto puke in distress and creeped-out-ness.
• Vinny of Vinesauce told a story of himself doing this when he was a little kid. He was playing Super Mario Kart with an older cousin who was defeating him constantly. Vinny hit his cousin in the shoulder out of frustration, which lead his parents to confiscate his Super NES as punishment. This made Vinny so mad that he threw up.

Webcomics

• In Bittersweet Candy Bowl, Lucy vomits after Mike's "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• In Clarissa the title character does this at an extremely awkward family breakfast, because her father is sexually abusing her.
• Cursed Princess Club: When the Plaid Kingdom princes take the Pastel Kingdom princesses on a date to an amusement park, they get the idea to bring the girls into the haunted house full of Monster Clowns. Their thinking is that whenever the princesses get scared, they'll frantically run into the arms of the princes and reinforce their romantic bonds. Unfortunately, Maria gets so scared of a "vampire clown" that, rather than running into Blaine's arms, she hurls out a stream of Rainbow Puke. By the time they all return home to the Pastel Palace (after what's implied to be many more encounters with creepy clowns), Maria's dress is drenched in multicolor vomit.
• Fate/type Redline: After his Servant Okita Souji kills a bunch of soldiers who were trying to kill them, Kanata Akagi vomits while lamenting that he's weak and cannot get used to violence and death.
• Grrl Power: After she helps foil a bank robbery alongside a superhero, Sydney finally stops to think about what she's just been though and promptly loses her lunch on said superhero's boots. The bank is promptly evacuated as Sydney's lunch was what most people would consider a chemical weapon.
• Just a Goblin: After discovering that some adventurers kill goblins purely for sport, Nog flees to vomit in an alleyway. He does it again when he learns that all monsters like him are treated as nothing more than potential sources of ingredients for human conveniences.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Emil does this after the first book salvaging mission ends with him, Sigrun and Lalli narrowly escaping a bunch of trolls that turned out to be nesting in the building.
• In Tales of the Questor, when an arrested gang leader threatens Quentyn's family, Quentyn breaks his nose, gives him a long list of reasons not to try, and stomps out...and then promptly vomits into a trash can as soon as he's out of sight.
• Unsounded: Lemuel vomits after he's confronted with just what his faction's plotting has done to his brother and he beheads him in a panic, thinking he's killed him.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: In "Jake the Dog", Jake vomits after realizing the gravity of the present situation: his wish to Prismo is the only chance he has to save the world, and he has to be specific, or else there could be disastrous consequences.
• Arcane: Upon seeing the bodies of Marcus and all of the officers killed by Jinx, Jayce has to go to the ledge and vomit from shock.
• Archer: Sterling Archer will throw up if he pictures someone sleeping with his mother. It's a... very sore subject for him.
• American Dad!: In "White Rice", Stan wants to sabotage Francine's stand-up career, which is largely based on her being the adopted white child of Chinese immigrants. He makes her nervous right before a big show, she throws up on stage, and Stan leaves, confident that he's succeeded. Turns out that she spent the next twenty minutes ad-libbing about how vomit looks like Chinese food, the execs loved it, and she got her own sitcom.
• The Awesomes: Muscleman reveals that he rarely freaks out due to long experience with the bizarre things that happen around superheroes, but when he does, he vomits. The episode then has him vomit repeatedly.
• Bob's Burgers: In "Boyz 4 Now", one of the fans waiting in line at the concert is so wound-up and excited she pukes at the prospect of seeing boys.
• Canhead: Jay temporarily escapes from the giant pursuing him by plunging through a "hole" in the desert (a drainage hole in the work bench the short taks place on). Once he lands at the bottom of the drainage area, he vomits.
• Futurama: In "Bender's Game", Titanius Anglesmith (Bender) vomits a handful of nuts and bolts upon seeing "THE TUNNELING HORROR!" emerge from a cave wall.
• The Ghost and Molly McGee: In "Hooray for Mollywood!", this happens to Libby when Molly wants her to act in her homemade monster movie.
  Libby: Molly, the very thought of people watching me... onscreen... in HD... makes me...! (doubles over and vomits into a bush)
• Gravity Falls: In "Carpet Diem", after the twins trigger the accidental body swap, Mabel (in Dipper's body) is so shocked and distressed that she ends up puking in the toilet.
• Robot Chicken: In a sketch depicting the Looney Tunes, Bugs Bunny is getting ready to rap battle with Elmer Fudd on stage. Daffy Duck comes into the bathroom to inform Bugs, who is rehearsing there, that he is next. The latter is so stressed and anxious that he vomits an orange splash of carrots and a green root leaf in the sink.
• South Park: Stan vomits whenever Wendy talks to him, sometimes even vomiting on her. They're still an item in spite of this.

Real Life

• It's not uncommon for people who have panic attacks to report extreme nausea and even vomiting prior to and during the panic attack. This can sometimes make the distressed person think they've been taken ill with something more serious like a heart attack, which of course only makes the problem worse.
• Severe bodily pain can cause enough physical stress to trigger nausea and vomiting, and it doesn't have to be abdominal pain. Severe back pain, severe menstrual pain, childbirth, heart attacks, broken bones, and migraine headaches are common causes.
• It isn't uncommon for people to cry so hard that they end up vomiting, as these actions require input from both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These two sides wrestling for control can exacerbate an existing fight-or-flight response, and up comes the stomach contents as a result.
• Physiologically, vomiting under extreme stress makes sense: during the body's fight-or-flight response, a massive portion of one's blood flow is re-routed to the musculature, heart, and skin, the better to engage in retreat or life-or-death combat without overheating or muscle fatigue. This leaves very little blood available to sustain the digestive system, which therefore wouldn't extract much benefit from the food anyway, so why not lighten the load?
• It's far from unknown for athletes, particularly those competing in endurance events like marathons or triathlons, to finish their event and then throw up; It happened to Norwegian Olympic Triathlete Kristian Blummenfelt immediately after he crossed the finish line to secure the gold, and US marathon runner Bob Kempainen threw up both during the last miles of his trial for the Olympic Marathon team and immediately after crossing the finish line (despite the vomiting he finished first, setting a new course record time of 2:12:45). Nike were impressed enough to produce an ad campaign based around the candid post-race picture of him throwing up on their shoes.
• Snakes. If a snake that’s just eaten a large meal is stressed or frightened and needs to escape, it will vomit up its meal so it can move faster. This likely helped contribute to the urban legend that snakes will vomit up their prey for the sadistic pleasure of eating it again.

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