The fastest way to get over a hangover is to rehydrate, eat something, manage your pain safely, and sleep it off. There’s no instant cure, but the right combination of steps can shorten your misery and prevent you from making it worse. Hangover symptoms peak once your body has fully cleared the alcohol from your blood, and they can linger for up to 24 hours or longer.
Why You Feel This Bad
Your liver processes roughly one standard drink per hour. During that time, it converts alcohol into a toxic byproduct with properties similar to formaldehyde, which is a major contributor to the headache and nausea you’re feeling. A night of heavy drinking means your liver keeps producing this chemical for hours after your last sip.
But the toxic byproduct isn’t the whole story. Alcohol triggers an inflammatory response throughout your body, raising levels of C-reactive protein (an inflammation marker) by about 50% and doubling cortisol, your primary stress hormone. It also disrupts your sleep cycles, lowers your blood sugar, and depletes fluids and electrolytes. The combination of all these insults at once is what makes a hangover feel so uniquely terrible. Your symptoms actually peak after your blood alcohol drops back to zero, which is why you often feel worse in the morning than you did when you stopped drinking.
Rehydrate With Electrolytes
Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning it causes you to lose more fluid than you take in. Much of the headache, dizziness, and fatigue you’re feeling comes from dehydration. Plain water helps, but adding electrolytes speeds things up because you’ve also lost sodium, potassium, and other minerals. Sports drinks, coconut water, or oral rehydration solutions all work. Pedialyte has become a popular choice because it has a higher electrolyte concentration than most sports drinks.
Sip steadily rather than chugging. If you’re nauseous, drinking too much too fast can make you vomit and set you back further. Small, frequent sips over the course of a few hours are more effective than forcing down a liter at once.
Eat the Right Foods
Alcohol suppresses your body’s ability to maintain blood sugar levels overnight, and low blood sugar contributes to the shakiness, weakness, and irritability of a hangover. Eating carbohydrate-rich foods like toast, crackers, oatmeal, or bananas helps bring those levels back up.
Eggs are a particularly good hangover food for a specific reason: they’re rich in an amino acid called L-cysteine, which your liver uses to produce glutathione, one of its primary tools for neutralizing alcohol’s toxic byproducts. One cup of oatmeal provides about 227 mg of L-cysteine, so a breakfast of eggs and oatmeal covers multiple bases at once. That said, L-cysteine from food won’t instantly erase your symptoms. It supports your liver’s ongoing cleanup rather than providing a dramatic fix.
If your stomach can’t handle solid food yet, broth is a useful middle ground. It delivers fluid, sodium, and some calories without requiring much digestion.
Choose Your Pain Reliever Carefully
This is where people commonly make a mistake that can cause real harm. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) and alcohol are both processed by your liver, and combining them stresses the organ significantly. Acetaminophen overdose is the most common cause of acute liver failure, and alcohol makes the threshold for toxicity lower. If your liver is still clearing last night’s drinks, acetaminophen is a poor choice.
Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) or naproxen (Aleve) are generally safer options for hangover headaches, though they come with their own caveat: NSAIDs can irritate your stomach lining, which alcohol has already inflamed. Take them with food, use the lowest effective dose, and don’t make it a regular habit if you drink frequently. The Mayo Clinic notes that NSAIDs used often or with alcohol can also damage the liver over time.
Sleep as Much as You Can
Alcohol fragments your sleep architecture even if you were unconscious for eight hours. It suppresses REM sleep and causes more awakenings in the second half of the night. Much of the brain fog, irritability, and fatigue of a hangover is essentially sleep deprivation layered on top of everything else. If your schedule allows it, going back to sleep is one of the most effective things you can do. Your body does its best repair work during rest, and time is ultimately the only thing that fully resolves a hangover.
What Doesn’t Work
“Hair of the dog,” or drinking more alcohol the next morning, is one of the oldest hangover remedies and one of the worst. It may temporarily block the metabolism of certain toxic byproducts, providing short-term relief, but it simply delays the inevitable crash and adds more work for your liver. It’s also a pattern strongly associated with the development of alcohol dependence.
Coffee is a mixed bag. Caffeine can help with the headache and grogginess, but it’s also a diuretic, which works against your rehydration efforts. If you’re a regular coffee drinker and skipping it would give you a caffeine withdrawal headache on top of your hangover, a small cup with plenty of water alongside it is reasonable. Just don’t expect it to sober you up or speed recovery.
Supplements With Some Evidence
Prickly pear cactus extract is one of the few supplements with clinical trial data behind it. In one study, taking the extract before drinking reduced the risk of severe hangover by 50%. It appears to work by lowering inflammation: in participants who took a placebo, alcohol raised C-reactive protein levels by 50%, but prickly pear extract brought CRP levels back down to pre-drinking baseline. The catch is that you need to take it before you drink, which doesn’t help you right now.
Dihydromyricetin (DHM), derived from the Japanese raisin tree, has shown promise in laboratory research. It appears to trigger the liver to produce more of the enzymes that break down alcohol and its toxic byproducts, and to make those enzymes work more efficiently. However, most of this research has been conducted in animals, so the practical benefit for humans is still being established. DHM supplements are widely available, but don’t expect dramatic results.
How to Prevent the Next One
The type of alcohol you drink matters more than most people realize. Dark liquors like bourbon, brandy, and whiskey contain high levels of congeners, which are chemical byproducts of fermentation. Red wine is also high in congeners. These compounds are associated with more severe hangovers. Vodka and beer contain the fewest congeners. In one well-known comparison, hangover severity scores were significantly higher after bourbon than after vodka at the same blood alcohol level.
Beyond choosing lighter-colored drinks, the most effective prevention strategies are straightforward: alternate alcoholic drinks with water, eat a substantial meal before drinking, and pace yourself to stay closer to one drink per hour, which is roughly the rate your liver can keep up with. None of this is glamorous advice, but your body’s processing speed is a hard biological limit that no supplement or trick can meaningfully override.