If you’re one of the lucky few adults in the world who’ve never had a hangover, well, I just don’t think we can be friends. Because that means you’ve never woken up to a headache that makes squirting lemon juice in your eye seem pleasant by comparison, or nausea so powerful that your stomach is heaving like a San Francisco street during the Loma Prieta earthquake, or a mouth so dry you couldn’t moisten a single postage stamp if your life depended on it. And these are only the initial physical sensations that greet you when you wake up after tying one on—it only gets worse from there. With each passing moment, as you become increasingly aware of just how much your body hates you, the questions build: Will I make it to the bathroom in time if I get sick? How can I get an enormous pile of greasy food in front of me without leaving this bed? How many empty promises did I make to people I dislike last night? Come to think of it, how did I even get home?
For those of you who are all too familiar with this grim scenario, you know what comes next: the painfully slow recovery and the accompanying vow, “I’ll never drink again as long as I live.” That never lasts, but the more experience we have with hangovers, the more tricks we learn for mitigating their deleterious effects on our physical well-being. But first, let’s start with the basics …
What Are Hangovers, Exactly?
Despite the fact that, according to Discovery Health, more than 75 percent of alcohol consumers have been hungover at least once, medical experts aren’t 100 percent certain about the exact bodily processes that lead to this state. They have, however, narrowed down their ideas to two primary theories. The first is that a hangover actually signifies minor alcohol withdrawal, which Medical News Today calls a “hyperstimulatory state.” In a hungover state, this school of thought says, people’s bodies may feel fatigued, but their central nervous system is actually agitated, and that agitation is what we’ve come to know as a hangover. The fact that alcohol is a diuretic, and therefore highly dehydrating, only makes matters worse by causing the hangover’s signature splitting headache.
The second theory holds that hangovers result not from alcohol itself, but rather from certain biological and chemical compounds it contains, called congeners. Medical News Today explains that many alcohols are created through yeast, which ferments sugar and alcohol to form potable ethyl alcohol, but also sometimes produces methanol, a much more toxic type of alcohol, in the process. When we consume trace amounts of methanol along with the ethyl alcohol we drink, our livers don’t actually expel it from our bodies. Instead, they metabolize the methanol as formaldehyde, which then stays in our bloodstream much longer than ethyl alcohol does. It’s the production of this formaldehyde, scientists in this camp maintain, that causes the symptoms we identify as a hangover: most commonly, headache, fatigue, dehydration, and nausea, but also difficulty sleeping, trembling, diarrhea, sensitivity to light and sound, and anxiety.
