There’s no instant cure for a hangover, but you can significantly shorten its duration and reduce the misery with the right combination of fluids, food, rest, and timing. Hangover symptoms peak once your body finishes processing alcohol and your blood alcohol level drops to zero, then can linger for up to 24 hours. The key is supporting your body’s recovery process rather than fighting against it.
Why Hangovers Feel So Bad
When you drink, your liver works to break down ethanol into a toxic intermediate compound called acetaldehyde before converting it into a relatively harmless substance called acetate. The longer acetaldehyde lingers in your system, the more damage it does to your cells, proteins, and DNA. Your body also generates harmful oxygen free radicals during this process, compounding the cellular stress.
At the same time, alcohol triggers widespread inflammation throughout your tissues and disrupts the healthy bacteria in your gut, which can lead to nausea and digestive problems. It also interferes with several brain chemicals involved in mood, energy, and alertness. Your hormones shift to compensate for dehydration. All of these effects happening simultaneously is what makes a hangover feel like a full-body assault rather than just a headache.
Rehydrate With Electrolytes, Not Just Water
Plain water helps, but it’s not enough on its own. Alcohol suppresses a hormone that normally tells your kidneys to retain water, so you lose both fluid and essential minerals like sodium and potassium. Research on rehydration has consistently shown that replacing electrolytes alongside water is necessary for effective recovery. Drinks with low electrolyte content, like beer or plain water, don’t restore fluid balance nearly as well as an oral rehydration solution.
Your best options are electrolyte drinks, coconut water, or broth-based soups. Sports drinks work in a pinch. Sip steadily rather than chugging large amounts at once, which can trigger more nausea. Starting to rehydrate before bed, if you can manage it, gives your body a head start overnight.
Eat the Right Foods
Eggs are one of the best hangover foods for a specific reason: they’re rich in an amino acid called cysteine, which your body uses to produce a powerful antioxidant called glutathione. Drinking depletes your glutathione stores, and without adequate levels, your body struggles to break down acetaldehyde. Eating eggs helps replenish that supply.
Fruit and fruit juice may also help more than you’d expect. Fructose, the natural sugar in fruit, has been shown in lab studies to increase the rate of alcohol metabolism by more than 50%. This effect appears to be unique to fructose and doesn’t occur with regular glucose. While the effect in humans may be more modest than in controlled lab conditions, eating fruit, drinking orange juice, or having honey (which is high in fructose) is a reasonable and low-risk strategy.
Beyond eggs and fruit, stick to bland, easy-to-digest foods. Toast, bananas, oatmeal, and crackers give your body fuel without further irritating your stomach. Bananas are particularly useful because they’re high in potassium, which helps replace what you lost.
Choose the Right Pain Reliever
If your headache demands medication, reach for ibuprofen, aspirin, or naproxen. These are not associated with liver toxicity and work well for hangover pain, though they can cause some stomach irritation, so take them with food.
Avoid acetaminophen (Tylenol). The combination of acetaminophen and alcohol is genuinely dangerous to your liver, even with short-term use. Emergency rooms have seen a significant increase in liver toxicity cases from this combination. If you’ve had three or more drinks, acetaminophen is off the table.
What Actually Helps vs. What Doesn’t
“Hair of the dog,” or drinking more alcohol the next morning, does temporarily mask symptoms by re-introducing the substance your body is withdrawing from. But it just delays and extends the hangover while adding more toxins for your liver to process. It makes the eventual crash worse.
Coffee can help with the fatigue and headache if you’re a regular caffeine drinker, since part of your misery may be caffeine withdrawal on top of the hangover. But caffeine is also a diuretic, so pair it with extra water.
Supplements marketed as hangover cures are largely unproven. One compound that gets attention, dihydromyricetin (DHM), is currently in early-phase human safety trials. There are no published controlled human studies confirming an effective dose. Prickly pear extract has slightly more evidence behind it: one study found that taking the extract before drinking cut the risk of a severe hangover roughly in half. The catch is you have to take it before you drink, not after.
Prevention Makes More Difference Than Treatment
The type of alcohol you choose matters more than most people realize. Darker drinks contain higher levels of congeners, which are chemical byproducts of fermentation that worsen hangovers. Brandy tops the list, with methanol levels reaching nearly 4,800 milligrams per liter compared to just 27 milligrams per liter in beer. Red wine and rum are also high in congeners. Vodka and light beer sit at the bottom of the scale. Choosing lighter-colored drinks won’t prevent a hangover, but it can reduce its severity.
Other strategies that genuinely help: eat a substantial meal before or while drinking, since food slows alcohol absorption. Alternate every alcoholic drink with a glass of water. Drink a full glass of water and eat a small snack before going to bed. These steps won’t make you immune, but they reduce the total burden on your body.
How Long a Hangover Lasts
Most hangovers resolve within 12 to 24 hours. Symptoms typically hit their worst point the morning after drinking, once your blood alcohol has dropped to zero. The timeline depends on how much you drank, your body weight, and how well you hydrated and ate beforehand. Sleep is one of the most effective recovery tools simply because it gives your body uninterrupted time to repair the damage.
If someone who has been drinking heavily shows confusion, repeated vomiting, seizures, difficulty staying conscious, or cannot be woken up, that’s not a hangover. Those are signs of alcohol poisoning, which is a life-threatening emergency requiring immediate medical attention.