I thought I'd metion this as it has taken me absolutely years to realise I was making a cough worse.
I was the sort of person who always suffered with a racking cough, after colds and at other times. Last year it suddenly dawned on me that I 'over cough'. What I mean by this is I would start to cough and I would cough loudly and deeply in the hopes of shifting anything that was there. Needles to say it didn't make the slightest bit of difference, but I still continued to do it. It suddenly struck me that maybe I was making things worse so I stopped myself from doing this and if I needed to cough I tried to cough with less gusto, just the minimum that I absolutely needed. To my delight this has worked a treat and I haven't had a troublesome cough for well over a year now.