There’s no instant cure for a hangover, but several strategies can meaningfully reduce how long and how badly you feel. Hangover symptoms peak once your blood alcohol level drops back to zero, typically the morning after drinking, and can last 24 hours or longer. The key is addressing the specific things going wrong in your body: dehydration, low blood sugar, inflammation, and stomach irritation.
Why You Feel This Bad
A hangover isn’t just one problem. It’s several happening at once. Your body treated alcohol as a toxin and prioritized breaking it down over its normal functions. Your liver, which normally keeps your blood sugar steady, was too busy processing alcohol to maintain glucose levels. That’s why you might feel shaky, weak, or foggy. Alcohol also suppresses a hormone that tells your kidneys to retain water, so you’ve been losing fluids (and electrolytes) all night. On top of that, your immune system triggered an inflammatory response, which drives the headache, muscle aches, and general misery.
Understanding these overlapping causes matters because the best recovery strategy targets each one individually rather than relying on a single fix.
Rehydrate With Electrolytes, Not Just Water
Drinking water helps, but plain water alone won’t replace the sodium, potassium, and other minerals you lost. Sports drinks, coconut water, or oral rehydration solutions work faster because they replace electrolytes alongside fluid. Broth or soup serves double duty here, providing both salt and liquid.
Sip steadily rather than chugging a huge amount at once, especially if your stomach is already upset. If you’re vomiting, small frequent sips are more likely to stay down than a full glass.
Eat Something, Even If You Don’t Want To
Your blood sugar is likely low. While your liver was busy metabolizing alcohol, it neglected its usual job of releasing stored glucose into your bloodstream. This is a real physiological dip, not just feeling sluggish, and it contributes to fatigue, weakness, irritability, and difficulty concentrating.
Toast, crackers, oatmeal, bananas, or any easily digestible carbohydrate will help bring your blood sugar back up. You don’t need a greasy diner breakfast (that’s more tradition than science). What matters is getting some carbohydrates into your system. If you feel particularly shaky or unwell, eating 15 grams of carbs, roughly a slice of bread or a tablespoon of honey, and then reassessing how you feel after 15 minutes is a simple approach. Once you’re feeling more stable, follow up with a fuller meal that includes some protein to keep your blood sugar from dropping again.
Choose Your Painkiller Carefully
Reaching for a painkiller is one of the first things most people do, but the wrong choice can make things worse.
Acetaminophen (Tylenol) and alcohol are both processed by your liver using the same protective molecule. Drinking depletes that molecule, which means your liver is less equipped to handle acetaminophen safely. The Cleveland Clinic notes that acetaminophen toxicity accounts for nearly half of acute liver failure cases in North America. If you had a couple of drinks, a normal dose the next day is generally fine for most people. But if you drank heavily, or if heavy drinking is a regular pattern for you, acetaminophen adds real risk.
Ibuprofen (Advil) and naproxen (Aleve) are anti-inflammatories, which makes them a better match for the inflammatory component of a hangover. However, they irritate the stomach lining, and alcohol does the same thing. The combination is more than additive. FDA advisory committees found that combining these painkillers with heavy alcohol use significantly increases the risk of serious gastrointestinal problems like bleeding ulcers. For an occasional hangover after moderate drinking, ibuprofen with food and water is a reasonable option. If your stomach is already in rough shape, though, it may do more harm than good.
Settle Your Stomach With Ginger
If nausea is your main complaint, ginger is one of the better-supported natural remedies. The active compounds in ginger work on the same receptor system that prescription anti-nausea medications target, blocking signals in the gut that trigger vomiting. This isn’t folk medicine speculation; the mechanism has been demonstrated in binding studies showing that ginger compounds interfere with serotonin receptor channels involved in the nausea response.
Ginger tea, ginger chews, or even flat ginger ale (the kind made with real ginger, not just flavoring) can take the edge off. Steep a few slices of fresh ginger in hot water for five to ten minutes for a simple tea.
Sleep If You Can
Alcohol disrupts sleep architecture. Even if you were in bed for eight hours, you likely got poor quality rest, with less time in the deeper, restorative sleep stages. This alone explains a lot of the brain fog and fatigue. 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 sleep, and there’s no shortcut that replaces it.
If you can’t sleep, at least rest. A hangover is a recovery process, not something you can push through with willpower. Physical exertion and “sweating it out” won’t speed up alcohol metabolism and may worsen dehydration.
What Doesn’t Work
“Hair of the dog,” or drinking more alcohol the next morning, delays your hangover rather than curing it. You’re simply resetting the clock. Your body still has to process the total amount of alcohol eventually, and you’ll feel it later with compound interest. Coffee can help with the headache if you’re a regular caffeine drinker (since caffeine withdrawal adds to the pain), but it’s also a diuretic that can worsen dehydration. If you drink coffee, match it with extra water.
IV hydration clinics have become trendy, but for a standard hangover, oral rehydration works just as well. Your gut absorbs fluids efficiently, and the main advantage of an IV is speed, which rarely justifies the cost.
Prevention Works Better Than Any Cure
No recovery strategy matches the effectiveness of drinking less in the first place. But a few practical habits reduce severity: eating a substantial meal before drinking slows alcohol absorption, alternating alcoholic drinks with water reduces total dehydration, and sticking to lighter-colored liquors (vodka, gin) means less exposure to congeners, the fermentation byproducts that worsen hangovers in darker spirits like bourbon and red wine.
One interesting finding from a clinical trial: taking prickly pear cactus extract before drinking cut the risk of a severe hangover roughly in half. It’s not widely available as a supplement, and it needs to be taken before you drink, not after. But it’s one of the few natural remedies with clinical trial evidence behind it.
Ultimately, a hangover is your body recovering from a mild poisoning. The timeline is roughly 24 hours from when your blood alcohol hits zero. Hydration, food, rest, and careful use of anti-inflammatories are the tools that make those hours more bearable. Nothing eliminates them entirely.