A hangover headache and vomiting will resolve on their own, but the right combination of rehydration, food timing, and pain relief can cut hours off your misery. The average hangover lasts about 18 hours from your last drink, with symptoms peaking roughly 14 hours after you stopped drinking. Most of what you can do is support your body while it finishes processing alcohol and its byproducts.
Why Alcohol Causes Headaches and Vomiting
Understanding what’s happening in your body helps explain why certain remedies work and others don’t. Alcohol triggers inflammation in the blood vessels surrounding your brain. It activates pain-sensing nerve endings in the membranes around the brain, which release signaling molecules that cause those blood vessels to swell. This swelling is what produces the throbbing, pressure-like headache that gets worse when you bend over or move quickly.
Vomiting is a separate process. Alcohol irritates the stomach lining directly, and nerve endings in the stomach send distress signals to the brain. At the same time, a region in the brainstem monitors the alcohol level in your blood. When it detects too much, it sends a signal back down to the stomach to expel its contents. This is actually a protective mechanism, but it continues into the hangover period because the irritation and inflammation don’t stop the moment you stop drinking.
Stop the Vomiting First
If you’re actively vomiting, don’t try to drink a full glass of water or eat a meal. Your stomach will reject it, and you’ll lose more fluid than you took in. Start with small sips of water or a clear broth, about a tablespoon every few minutes. Once you’ve kept that down for 20 to 30 minutes, gradually increase the amount.
Lying on your side rather than your back reduces the risk of choking if you vomit again. Avoid acidic drinks like orange juice or coffee until the nausea has fully passed, since they add more irritation to an already inflamed stomach lining. Cold or room-temperature liquids tend to stay down better than hot ones.
Rehydrate With More Than Water
Plain water helps, but it doesn’t replace the sodium and potassium you lost through vomiting and alcohol’s diuretic effect. A simple oral rehydration solution based on the World Health Organization formula is easy to make at home: combine about 4 cups of water with half a teaspoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of sugar. The sugar isn’t just for taste. It helps your intestines absorb the sodium and water significantly faster than water alone.
If you don’t want to mix your own, broth-based options work well too. A regular-sodium chicken or vegetable broth diluted with equal parts water, plus a couple tablespoons of sugar stirred in, hits a similar balance. Miso soup is another solid option. Sports drinks are better than plain water but contain more sugar and less sodium than ideal, so adding a small pinch of salt to a diluted sports drink gets you closer to what your body needs.
Aim to drink steadily over several hours rather than forcing large volumes at once. Your gut absorbs fluids more efficiently in smaller, consistent amounts, and gulping a liter of anything when your stomach is irritated is a fast route back to vomiting.
Choosing a Pain Reliever Safely
This is where people often make mistakes. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) combined with alcohol can cause serious liver damage. Your liver is already working hard to break down alcohol byproducts, and acetaminophen adds a second toxic load to the same organ. If there’s any chance alcohol is still in your system, avoid acetaminophen entirely.
Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) or aspirin are generally the better choice for a hangover headache, but they come with their own caveat: both can irritate the stomach lining, which is already inflamed from alcohol. If you’re still nauseous or have been vomiting, taking ibuprofen on an empty stomach may make the nausea worse. Wait until you’ve kept some food down, then take the lowest effective dose with a meal or snack. A piece of toast or a few crackers is enough to buffer the effect.
What to Eat and When
Eating helps, but timing and food choice matter. Once the vomiting has stopped and you’ve been keeping fluids down for at least 30 minutes, start with bland, starchy foods. Toast, plain rice, crackers, or a banana are easy on an irritated stomach and provide glucose your brain needs to function. Avoid greasy or heavily seasoned food until your stomach feels more settled, despite the popular advice about greasy breakfast food “soaking up” alcohol. That myth has no basis. Grease can actually slow digestion and prolong nausea.
Bananas deserve a special mention because they’re rich in potassium, which is one of the key electrolytes depleted by alcohol and vomiting. They’re also soft, easy to digest, and unlikely to trigger more nausea.
Minerals That Support Recovery
Alcohol depletes several minerals that play roles in how you feel during a hangover. Magnesium and zinc are two of the most relevant. Zinc helps maintain your body’s main antioxidant defenses, which take a hit during alcohol metabolism. Magnesium supports muscle relaxation, sleep quality, and exercise tolerance, all of which suffer during a hangover. Research suggests that magnesium supplementation improves sleep and physical performance even in people who are simply sleep-deprived, which describes most hungover people.
You don’t need specialty supplements to get these. Foods like bananas, avocados, nuts, and seeds are rich in magnesium. Zinc is found in meat, eggs, and whole grains. If you have a multivitamin with these minerals, taking one with food during your recovery is reasonable.
What Doesn’t Work
“Hair of the dog,” or drinking more alcohol, delays the hangover rather than curing it. It temporarily raises your blood alcohol level, which suppresses the withdrawal-like rebound your nervous system is going through, but you’ll feel worse later when you have even more alcohol byproducts to process.
No natural remedy has been shown to consistently relieve hangover symptoms in clinical studies. Products marketed as hangover cures, whether herbal blends, activated charcoal, or vitamin cocktails, lack reliable evidence. Time is the one guaranteed cure. The average hangover resolves about 12 hours after waking up, though this varies depending on how much you drank, your body size, and how well-hydrated and fed you were before drinking.
Prevention for Next Time
Darker alcoholic drinks produce worse hangovers than clear ones. Bourbon, whiskey, red wine, and dark rum contain higher levels of congeners, which are chemical byproducts of fermentation that your body has to break down separately from the alcohol itself. One study found that bourbon, a high-congener liquor, produced significantly more severe hangovers than vodka, which contains very few congeners. If you’re prone to bad hangovers, switching to lighter-colored drinks can make a measurable difference.
Eating a substantial meal before drinking slows alcohol absorption and reduces peak blood alcohol levels. Alternating alcoholic drinks with water throughout the night addresses dehydration before it starts. Neither of these prevents a hangover entirely if you drink heavily, but both reduce how severe the next morning feels.