Your body clears alcohol at a fixed rate of about .015 to .020 BAC per hour, and nothing you do will speed that up. If you’re at the legal limit of .08, expect four to five hours before your blood alcohol hits zero. The only real “cure” is time, but there’s plenty you can do to feel better while you wait and to bounce back faster the next morning.
Why Time Is the Only Thing That Actually Works
Your liver processes roughly one standard drink per hour. That’s one 12-ounce beer, one 5-ounce glass of wine, or one ounce of 100-proof liquor. This rate is essentially fixed. Your weight, biological sex, and individual liver enzyme activity create some variation, but no food, drink, or trick meaningfully accelerates the process. Women generally take longer to reach zero BAC than men at the same number of drinks, largely because of differences in body water content and enzyme levels.
This means if you had six drinks over two hours, you’re looking at roughly four to six more hours before your system is clear. Planning around that timeline is far more useful than chasing shortcuts.
What to Eat and Drink Right Now
Alcohol forces your liver to prioritize breaking down ethanol over its normal job of regulating blood sugar. That’s why you might feel shaky, lightheaded, or weak. Eating food helps because it’s digested gradually, providing a steady supply of glucose rather than a quick spike and crash. Good options include toast, crackers, bananas, eggs, or oatmeal. Anything with a mix of carbohydrates and protein will stabilize your blood sugar more effectively than sugary drinks or candy.
Dehydration makes everything worse. Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning it causes your body to lose more fluid than you’re taking in. Drink water steadily. If you’ve been vomiting, a drink with electrolytes (like a sports drink or oral rehydration solution) helps replace lost sodium and potassium faster than water alone. Sip slowly rather than chugging, especially if your stomach is unsettled.
Coffee and Cold Showers Won’t Sober You Up
Coffee does not get rid of alcohol from your system. Your BAC will not drop any faster whether you drink ten cups or none. What caffeine can do is partially reverse the sedating effect of alcohol, which makes you feel more alert. That’s a double-edged sword: you may feel more capable than you actually are, which can lead to poor decisions like driving when you’re still impaired.
Cold showers are in the same category. A cold shower might make the experience of sobering up feel more tolerable, and it will certainly wake you up, but it has zero effect on the rate your liver processes alcohol. It can also be dangerous if you’re heavily intoxicated, since alcohol impairs your body’s ability to regulate temperature and a sudden cold shock can cause falls or other injuries.
Choosing the Right Painkiller
If you have a pounding headache, your instinct might be to reach for whatever’s in the medicine cabinet. Be careful with the choice. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is processed by the same liver that’s already working overtime on alcohol. It’s considered safe at proper doses under normal circumstances, but overdose is the most common cause of acute liver failure, and alcohol in your system raises that risk. If you take it, stay well below the recommended maximum and never combine it with more drinking.
Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) and naproxen (Aleve) carry their own risks. These can irritate your stomach lining, which alcohol has already inflamed, and they can also damage the liver when used with alcohol. If you’re going to take a painkiller, ibuprofen is generally the more common choice for a hangover headache, but keep it to a single standard dose and take it with food to protect your stomach.
How Alcohol Wrecks Your Sleep
You might pass out quickly after drinking, but the sleep you get is poor quality. Alcohol disrupts your sleep architecture in two key ways: it reduces deep sleep (the restorative phase your brain needs for memory consolidation and physical recovery) and it fragments REM sleep, the phase associated with dreaming and emotional processing. The result is that even eight hours in bed can leave you feeling groggy and foggy.
If you can, sleep in a dark, cool room and give yourself extra time. Don’t set an alarm if you don’t have to. Your body will cycle through lighter sleep stages more than usual, so you’ll likely wake up multiple times during the night. That’s normal after drinking. Lying on your side rather than your back is also safer, since it reduces the risk of choking if you vomit in your sleep.
The Morning After
A hangover is essentially the combination of dehydration, low blood sugar, inflammation, and poor sleep hitting you all at once. By morning, most of the alcohol is likely out of your system, but the damage to your sleep quality and hydration lingers. Continue drinking water and eating easy, bland foods. Your stomach lining is irritated, so avoid anything acidic or greasy until your nausea passes.
Light physical activity, like a short walk outside, can help. It won’t flush alcohol out any faster, but it improves circulation, boosts your mood, and gets you moving when the temptation is to lie on the couch all day. Avoid intense exercise, though. Your coordination and reaction time may still be off, and you’re already dehydrated.
Most hangover symptoms resolve within 24 hours. If you still feel significantly unwell after a full day, or if symptoms like vomiting or confusion were severe from the start, that’s worth paying attention to.
Signs That Need Emergency Attention
There’s a line between being drunk and experiencing alcohol overdose, and it’s important to know where it is. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the warning signs include: slow breathing (fewer than eight breaths per minute), gaps of ten seconds or more between breaths, seizures, inability to wake someone up, vomiting while unconscious, clammy or bluish skin, and extremely low body temperature. If you see any of these in yourself or someone else, call emergency services immediately. Alcohol overdose can shut down the areas of the brain that control breathing and heart rate, and waiting it out can be fatal.
Never leave a heavily intoxicated person alone to “sleep it off.” Their BAC can continue rising even after they stop drinking, especially if they consumed a large amount in a short period. Turn them on their side, stay with them, and watch their breathing.