After a night of moderate to heavy drinking, most of us will experience one or more of the following symptoms: headaches, nausea, fatigue, sensitivity to light and sound, and dehydration. The morning after a really good time can even cause trembling, loss of appetite, and increased heart rate and blood pressure.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a set number of drinks to avoid waking up with these symptoms. It varies person to person, and is based on age, gender, tolerance, and can even vary day by day. Hangovers are made much worse if you drink on an empty stomach or don’t drink enough water. You also probably don’t realize it, but dancing and other physical activity can also make for a worse hangover in the morning. If you’re working up a sweat on the dance floor, you’re losing more water, calling for some serious dehydration and headaches in the morning.
Without boring you, it’s important to explain some of the biological effects of alcohol in the body. When you throw back a shot or two, the alcohol enters your body into the bloodstream and causes the pituitary gland in your brain to block the creation of vasopressin. In other words, it causes a diuretic effect. You might have noticed when you drink you have to go to the bathroom more than usual. Besides being inconvenient, it causes your body to become extremely dehydrated, losing potassium and other minerals along the way. The next morning, your dehydrated organs start to take water from your brain, causing your brain to actually decrease in size and pull on membranes that connect the brain to the skull! And as you can guess, this causes a major headache.
Most people think alcohol helps them sleep better. However, this is not necessarily true, especially after a night of heavy drinking. Alcohol inhibits glutamine production (something your body creates to heal your body). Once you stop drinking, the body tries to make up for lost time, and what better time than when you’re sleeping! This stimulates the brain, keeping you from reaching deep sleep. This contributes to fatigue, restlessness and high blood pressure symptoms the next day.
If you’ve found yourself curled around the toilet one too many times after a night of drinking, you’re not alone. In fact, as uncomfortable as it may be, vomiting does speed up the recovery time for some people. Cells that line the stomach become irritated from alcohol, promoting a build up of hydrochloric acid. This, along with an overall bad case of nausea, can leave you lingering near the toilet the next morning.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Beer before liquor you’ve never been sicker, Liquor before beer you’re in the clear”? Well, it’s true! Different types of alcohol actually cause different hangover symptoms. Usually, drinking 7 beers won’t make you feel nearly as bad as taking 7 shots of whisky or drinking 7 glasses of red wine. This is because different types of alcohol have different types and concentrations of congeners, or impurities in alcohol.
The greatest amount of congeners are found in red wine and dark liquors. Light beer and clear alcohol, like Vodka and Gin, have a lower concentration. If you really want to feel like crap the next morning, have a little of everything! Mixing different types of alcohol and their impurities makes for a much worse hangover. The above phrase is true because beer is processed slower than other types. So if after a few rounds of beer pong you start drinking vodka or whiskey, your body has less time to process the toxins, and you might find yourself running to the bathroom.
But it’s not all bad news! There are things you can do to prevent hangovers, or at least feel a little better the next morning. Some of the hangover remedies I’ve heard range from eating a big greasy breakfast to taking a shot of whatever you were drinking the night before. However, we don’t recommend those.
- Instead of eating fatty foods the next morning, which can irritate your stomach, try eating them before you drink to help line your stomach and help absorb the alcohol. A better breakfast is eggs and a banana. Both of these foods help replenish minerals and proteins that your body lost the night before and are causing symptoms. Drink fruit juice in the morning for fructose and vitamins.
- Pop an aspirin to ease the pain
- Take a multi-vitamin, get some fresh air, and try and squeeze some low-impact exercise in! It might suck at first, but you’ll feel so much better after!
- And most importantly, stay hydrated! If you want to drink and dance the night away make sure you drink plenty of water before, during, and afterwards. Drink a lot of water in the morning to keep your organs from stealing it from your brain!
Hopefully now that you know what is actually going on in your body when you drink alcohol, you will think twice about grabbing that 5th or 6th drink. But if you do, at least you know a few ways to feel a little better a little faster.
