There’s no instant cure for a hangover, but you can speed up recovery and ease the worst symptoms with a combination of hydration, food, rest, and the right over-the-counter pain relief. Your body clears alcohol at a fixed rate of roughly 15 to 20 mg per deciliter of blood per hour, so a heavy night of drinking takes time to fully process. Everything below is about making those hours more bearable and helping your body do its job faster.
Why You Feel This Bad
A hangover isn’t just one problem. It’s several hitting at once. Alcohol is a diuretic, so you lose more fluid than you take in, leading to the headache, dry mouth, and dizziness. Your liver, busy breaking down alcohol, slows its normal job of releasing stored glucose into your blood. That drop in blood sugar is a major reason you feel shaky, weak, and mentally foggy the next morning, especially if you were drinking on an empty stomach.
Then there’s sleep. Alcohol acts as a sedative and may knock you out quickly, but it suppresses REM sleep, the phase that leaves you feeling rested and helps with memory and concentration. As the alcohol wears off overnight, a rebound effect can wake you up repeatedly in the second half of the night. So even if you slept for eight hours, you likely got far less restorative sleep than usual. On top of all this, your body is still processing acetaldehyde, a toxic byproduct of alcohol metabolism that contributes to nausea and general misery.
Hydrate, but Do It Strategically
Water is the single most important thing you can reach for. Start drinking it as soon as you wake up and keep sipping throughout the morning. Plain water works, but adding electrolytes helps more, since alcohol flushes sodium and potassium along with fluid. A sports drink, coconut water, or even a pinch of salt in water with a squeeze of lemon will replenish what you lost faster than water alone.
Avoid chugging large amounts all at once if you’re nauseous. Small, frequent sips are easier on your stomach and actually absorb better. If you can tolerate it, broth or soup gives you fluid, sodium, and a few calories in one package.
What to Eat (and Why Eggs Are a Good Call)
Eating raises your blood sugar back to normal levels, which directly targets the fatigue, weakness, and brain fog. Bland, carbohydrate-rich foods like toast, crackers, or oatmeal are gentle on a sensitive stomach and give your body quick fuel. Bananas are useful because they’re easy to eat and replace potassium.
Eggs are one of the better hangover foods for a specific reason: they’re rich in cysteine, an amino acid that supports your body’s production of glutathione, a compound your liver relies on to neutralize toxins. Other high-protein foods like dairy, legumes, and nuts also provide cysteine. You don’t need to force a huge meal. Even a few bites of scrambled eggs on toast gives your body protein, carbohydrates, and the building blocks it needs to recover.
The Right Pain Reliever Matters
For a pounding headache, ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) or naproxen (Aleve) is generally the better choice over acetaminophen (Tylenol) when alcohol is still in your system. Acetaminophen is processed by the liver, and combining it with alcohol increases the risk of liver damage. That said, NSAIDs like ibuprofen can irritate your stomach lining, which is already inflamed from alcohol. Take them with food and water, not on an empty stomach.
If your stomach is too unsettled for a pill, wait until you’ve kept some food down. The headache will also improve as you rehydrate, so water alone may be enough to take the edge off.
Settling Your Stomach With Ginger
Ginger is one of the most reliable natural options for nausea. Research on nausea from other causes (like chemotherapy) suggests that around 1 gram of ginger per day is the threshold for meaningful relief. You don’t need a supplement. A cup of ginger tea, made by steeping a thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger in hot water for five to ten minutes, typically provides enough. Ginger chews or ginger ale made with real ginger (check the label) also work. If nausea is your dominant symptom, start with ginger before trying to eat a full meal.
Sleep It Off (for Real This Time)
Going back to sleep, if your schedule allows it, is one of the most effective things you can do. The sleep you got while drunk was low quality because alcohol suppressed your REM cycles. Sober sleep lets your brain cycle through those restorative phases normally. Even a 90-minute nap can make a noticeable difference in how clear-headed you feel afterward.
If you’re having trouble falling back asleep due to the rebound insomnia effect, a dark, cool room and avoiding your phone screen will help. Your body is in a mild withdrawal state from the alcohol wearing off, which can leave you wired and restless even though you’re exhausted.
What Your Drink Choice Has to Do With It
Not all alcohol produces the same hangover. Dark liquors like bourbon, brandy, cognac, red wine, and dark whiskey contain high levels of congeners, toxic byproducts of fermentation and distillation. One of the most problematic congeners is methanol, which your body breaks down into formaldehyde and formic acid. Tequila, despite being lighter in color, also has high congener levels.
Clear drinks like vodka, gin, white wine, light rum, and light beer contain far fewer congeners and tend to produce milder hangovers at equivalent amounts of alcohol. This won’t help you today, but it’s worth remembering next time. Mixing dark liquors with sugary mixers can make the effect even worse, since sugar causes its own blood sugar spike and crash that layers on top of the alcohol’s effects.
What Doesn’t Work
“Hair of the dog,” or drinking more alcohol in the morning, delays your hangover rather than curing it. It temporarily suppresses withdrawal-like symptoms, but your body still has to process the original alcohol plus whatever you just added. You’re pushing the misery forward and possibly making it worse.
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, a small cup with plenty of water on the side is reasonable. If you’re not, skip it.
A Realistic Recovery Timeline
Your liver processes alcohol at a relatively fixed rate. For most moderate drinkers, that’s about 15 mg per deciliter of blood per hour, which translates to roughly one standard drink per hour. If you had eight drinks over an evening, your body needs approximately eight hours just to clear the alcohol itself, and hangover symptoms typically peak several hours after your blood alcohol hits zero, not while you’re still processing it.
Most hangovers resolve within 24 hours. If you hydrate, eat, take a pain reliever with food, and get some real sleep, you can realistically cut the worst of it down to 12 hours or less. The fatigue and mild brain fog may linger into the evening, but the headache, nausea, and shaking usually clear by midday if you started addressing them in the morning.