Drinking more alcohol can temporarily ease hangover symptoms, but it does not cure or shorten a hangover. It delays the inevitable. Your body still has to process the original alcohol plus whatever you just added, which typically makes the eventual hangover worse and longer-lasting. Johns Hopkins Medicine explicitly advises against the practice, stating it “will only increase your misery.”
Why It Feels Like It Works
The “hair of the dog” trick has a grain of biochemical logic behind it, which is why it persists. When you drink heavily, your brain adapts to the presence of alcohol by dialing up excitatory signaling and dialing down calming signaling. When the alcohol leaves your system, that balance hasn’t corrected yet, leaving your brain in a hyperexcitable state. This is what produces many classic hangover symptoms: anxiety, irritability, sensitivity to light and sound, shakiness, and that general wired-but-exhausted feeling.
Drinking again temporarily reverses that imbalance. Alcohol floods the same calming pathways, quieting the rebound excitation. Animal studies have confirmed that alcohol consumption during withdrawal restores depleted brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine, which explains the brief mood lift. But none of the underlying damage gets repaired. You’re just resetting the clock.
What Actually Happens in Your Body
Hangover symptoms peak when your blood alcohol concentration drops back to about zero. That’s the point of maximum discomfort. Drinking more alcohol raises your blood alcohol level again, pushing that zero-point further into the future. You feel better for an hour or two, then the same crash arrives, often compounded by the additional alcohol your liver now has to process.
Your liver uses the same enzyme to break down both the ethanol in your drinks and trace amounts of methanol that occur naturally in many alcoholic beverages. Methanol gets converted into formaldehyde and then formic acid, both of which are toxic. Ethanol actually competes for that enzyme, so drinking more can temporarily slow methanol’s conversion into those harmful byproducts. This is, in fact, the basis for how hospitals treat methanol poisoning. But in a normal hangover, the amount of methanol involved is small, and your body can handle it on its own without another drink.
Meanwhile, heavy drinking leads to a buildup of acetaldehyde, a toxic byproduct of normal alcohol metabolism that contributes directly to nausea, headache, and flushing. Adding more alcohol doesn’t help your body clear acetaldehyde faster. It actually gives your liver more raw material to convert into acetaldehyde while the enzymes responsible for breaking it down are already overwhelmed.
The Dependency Risk
Researchers have identified a more serious concern with the hair-of-the-dog habit. The discomfort of a hangover shares significant overlap with mild alcohol withdrawal, and alcohol’s ability to relieve that discomfort creates a powerful motivational loop. Studies on alcohol withdrawal describe this as a force that “not only enhances relapse vulnerability, but also favors escalation of alcohol drinking to even higher levels.” In plain terms, regularly using alcohol to fix the aftereffects of alcohol is one of the clearest paths toward dependence.
Why Some Drinks Cause Worse Hangovers
Not all drinks produce equally bad hangovers, and the reason is congeners. These are chemical byproducts of fermentation and aging that give darker spirits their flavor, color, and aroma. Brandy contains up to 4,766 milligrams of methanol per liter. Beer contains about 27 milligrams per liter. Vodka consistently ranks lowest in congener content overall.
Drinks ranked from highest to lowest congener levels:
- High: brandy, red wine, rum
- Medium: whiskey, white wine, gin
- Low: vodka, beer
If you’re reaching for another drink the morning after, choosing a low-congener option like vodka won’t fix the hangover, but it at least avoids piling on additional toxic byproducts. That said, the smarter move is to skip the drink entirely.
What Actually Helps
No hangover cure has strong scientific backing, but several approaches address the specific things alcohol does to your body. Alcohol is a diuretic, so you lose fluid and electrolytes. Drinking water between alcoholic drinks reduces the severity the next day, and sports drinks or broth can help replace lost sodium and potassium after the fact.
Over-the-counter pain relievers can help with headache, but avoid acetaminophen (Tylenol). When your liver is still processing alcohol, acetaminophen can cause liver damage. Ibuprofen or aspirin are safer choices for most people, though they can irritate an already-upset stomach.
Beyond that, the honest answer is time. Your body needs to finish metabolizing the alcohol and its byproducts, rebalance its brain chemistry, and rehydrate. That process takes roughly 12 to 24 hours depending on how much you drank. Eating something, sleeping, and staying hydrated won’t speed it up dramatically, but they support the recovery that’s already underway rather than adding a new round of damage on top of it.