There’s no instant cure for a hangover, but you can shorten the misery and ease the worst symptoms with a few targeted strategies. The average hangover lasts about 18 hours after your last drink, or roughly 12 hours after waking up. Most of what you’re feeling comes down to three things: dehydration, inflammation, and low blood sugar. Tackling all three at once is the fastest path to feeling human again.
Why You Feel This Bad
A hangover kicks in once your blood alcohol level drops back to zero, typically 8 to 16 hours after drinking. At that point, your body is dealing with the aftermath rather than the alcohol itself. Your immune system ramps up inflammatory signaling molecules called cytokines, the same ones involved in flu-like symptoms. That’s why hangovers feel so much like being sick: the nausea, headache, fatigue, and brain fog are driven by the same inflammatory pathways.
Alcohol also suppresses your liver’s ability to produce new glucose. Your liver’s glucose-making capacity can drop by up to 45% after moderate drinking. Once your stored glucose is used up (usually 8 to 10 hours later), your blood sugar crashes. That shaky, weak, can’t-think-straight feeling the morning after? That’s largely hypoglycemia layered on top of dehydration and inflammation.
Rehydrate With Electrolytes, Not Just Water
Plain water helps, but it’s not the most efficient option. Alcohol increases urine output, and you lose sodium, potassium, and other electrolytes along with that fluid. Drinks that contain electrolytes, like sports drinks, coconut water, or broth, restore what plain water can’t. Bone broth or chicken broth is especially useful because it delivers sodium, potassium, and easy calories all at once.
Skip anything extremely salty, though. High-sodium drinks like vegetable juice cocktails or salt water can actually pull water out of your cells and make dehydration worse. Also avoid drinks loaded with sugar, which can have the same dehydrating effect. Sip steadily rather than chugging. Your stomach is already irritated, and flooding it won’t speed absorption.
Eat Something, Even If You Don’t Want To
Your blood sugar is likely low, and eating is one of the fastest ways to address the weakness, shakiness, and mental fog that come with it. Go for foods that combine complex carbohydrates with some protein and fat: eggs and toast, oatmeal with banana, or rice with a mild protein. These release glucose steadily without triggering the reactive blood sugar crash that simple sugars can cause.
Interestingly, drinking alcohol with a carbohydrate-heavy meal or sugary mixer (like gin and tonic) can make reactive hypoglycemia worse. If that describes your night, your blood sugar may be even lower than usual the next morning, making a solid breakfast more important.
Choose the Right Pain Reliever
Headache is often the most disruptive hangover symptom, and an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen or naproxen can help by directly targeting the inflammatory compounds your body is overproducing. These medications work against the same prostaglandin and thromboxane pathways that drive hangover headaches.
However, both ibuprofen and naproxen can irritate your stomach lining, which is already inflamed from alcohol. Take them with food, not on an empty stomach. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is a poor choice here. Your liver is already working overtime processing alcohol byproducts, and acetaminophen adds to that burden. The combination raises your risk of liver damage, especially if you drank heavily.
Be Careful With Coffee
A cup of coffee can ease a caffeine-withdrawal headache and make you feel more alert, but it doesn’t actually help your body process alcohol or its byproducts any faster. The CDC notes that caffeine does not reduce alcohol’s effects on the body. It’s also a mild diuretic, which works against the rehydration you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re a regular coffee drinker, a small cup is fine to avoid withdrawal symptoms on top of everything else. Just match it with extra water or an electrolyte drink.
What About IV Drips and Hangover Clinics?
IV hydration services have become popular in cities and resort towns, promising rapid hangover relief through intravenous fluids, vitamins, and sometimes anti-nausea medication. The appeal is obvious: fluids delivered straight to your bloodstream bypass a queasy stomach. But the clinical reality is less impressive. According to the University of Rochester Medical Center, IV fluids aren’t recommended unless you physically cannot keep water down. For most people, oral rehydration with electrolyte drinks works just as well at a fraction of the cost. If you can sip fluids and keep them down, your gut absorbs them efficiently enough that an IV offers no meaningful speed advantage.
Why Your Drink Choice Matters
Not all alcohol produces the same hangover. Dark spirits like bourbon, brandy, and whiskey contain high levels of congeners, chemical byproducts of fermentation that your body has to process alongside the alcohol itself. Red wine is also high in congeners, particularly methanol. Vodka and beer sit at the other end of the spectrum with the lowest congener levels.
Studies have shown that bourbon produces significantly worse hangover symptoms than vodka at the same blood alcohol level. Spirits in general tend to cause worse hangovers than beer or wine at equivalent alcohol doses. This won’t help you now, but it’s worth remembering for next time. If you’re already suffering from a dark-liquor hangover, you may simply need more time and more aggressive hydration than usual.
Supplements That May Help
Dihydromyricetin (DHM), a compound extracted from the Japanese raisin tree, has shown promise in animal studies. Research at USC found that DHM boosted the activity of the liver enzymes responsible for breaking down alcohol and its toxic byproduct, acetaldehyde. It also reduced fat accumulation in liver tissue and lowered inflammatory cytokines. These are the same inflammatory molecules elevated during a hangover. Human clinical data is still limited, but DHM supplements are widely available and some people report noticeable relief when taken before bed after drinking.
Green tea and honey chrysanthemum tea have some evidence suggesting they help the body process alcohol more quickly and may offer mild liver protection. Neither is a miracle fix, but a warm cup of non-caffeinated tea is also a gentle way to rehydrate without stressing your stomach.
The Realistic Timeline
Even with all of these strategies, you’re unlikely to feel 100% in an hour. The average hangover runs about 18 hours from your last drink. Aggressive rehydration, food, and an anti-inflammatory can meaningfully shorten that window and reduce symptom severity, but your immune system needs time to settle down and your liver needs time to finish its cleanup work. Most people who hydrate well, eat, and rest start feeling substantially better within 4 to 6 hours of waking up rather than dragging through an entire day.
Sleep itself is one of the most effective accelerators. Alcohol disrupts sleep architecture, so the “rest” you got while drunk wasn’t very restorative. If you can hydrate, eat a small meal, take ibuprofen with that food, and go back to sleep for a few hours, you’ll often wake up feeling dramatically better than if you’d tried to power through the morning.