A hangover goes away when your body finishes clearing alcohol’s toxic byproducts, calms the inflammatory response triggered by drinking, and restores the fluids, minerals, and blood sugar it lost along the way. That process takes roughly 12 to 24 hours on its own, but you can speed up how you feel by targeting each of those problems directly. No single remedy “cures” a hangover, because a hangover isn’t one problem. It’s several hitting you at once.
Why Hangovers Feel So Bad
Understanding what’s actually happening in your body helps explain why some remedies work and others don’t. When your liver breaks down alcohol, it produces a toxic intermediate compound that generates free radicals. Your immune system recognizes these as foreign threats and mounts an inflammatory response, flooding your bloodstream with the same signaling molecules your body uses to fight infections. Hangover severity correlates directly with blood levels of these inflammatory markers, particularly one linked to headache and difficulty concentrating.
At the same time, alcohol acts as a diuretic, suppressing the hormone that tells your kidneys to hold onto water. You lose not just fluid but key minerals: magnesium, potassium, calcium, sodium, phosphorus, and zinc. Your liver also deprioritizes releasing stored glucose while it’s busy processing alcohol, which can leave your blood sugar low, especially if you were drinking on an empty stomach. Add in the fact that alcohol fragments your sleep (more on that below), and you wake up dehydrated, inflamed, nutrient-depleted, glucose-starved, and poorly rested all at once.
Rehydrate With More Than Water
Drinking fluids is the single most straightforward thing you can do. Dehydration drives the headache, dizziness, and dry mouth, and your body rehydrates well through plain drinking. You don’t need an IV drip. Medical professionals reserve IV fluids for people who are severely dehydrated and unable to drink, and even then, IV rehydration won’t resolve the other mechanisms behind a hangover.
Plain water helps, but drinks that contain sodium and potassium replace what alcohol flushed out. Chicken broth, coconut water, or an oral rehydration solution all work better than water alone for this reason. Sports drinks can help too, though many are heavy on sugar. Start drinking fluids before bed if you can, and continue steadily the next morning rather than chugging large volumes at once.
Eat to Stabilize Blood Sugar
When your liver is occupied metabolizing alcohol, it releases less glucose into your bloodstream. Low blood sugar contributes to the shakiness, weakness, fatigue, and irritability of a hangover. Eating a meal that combines carbohydrates with protein and fat gives you both a quick glucose boost and sustained energy. Toast with eggs, oatmeal with peanut butter, or a banana with yogurt all fit the bill. If you’re feeling too nauseous for a full meal, even 15 grams of simple carbohydrates (a piece of fruit, a few crackers, a small glass of juice) can start bringing your blood sugar back up.
Manage Pain Safely
Reaching for a painkiller is instinctive, but which one matters. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is a poor choice after heavy drinking. Your liver is already stressed from processing alcohol, and acetaminophen adds to that burden. In the United States, acetaminophen toxicity is the leading cause of liver failure, and alcohol use is one of the factors that increases the drug’s ability to damage the liver.
Ibuprofen or aspirin are generally safer options for hangover headaches because they’re processed differently and also reduce the inflammation driving your symptoms. The tradeoff is that both can irritate your stomach lining, which alcohol has already aggravated. Taking them with food helps. Avoid combining multiple painkillers, and skip acetaminophen entirely until you’re confident your body has finished clearing the alcohol.
Why You Feel Exhausted Even After Sleeping
Alcohol initially makes you fall asleep faster, but it wrecks the quality of that sleep. In the first half of the night, it increases deep sleep while suppressing REM sleep, the phase critical for emotional regulation, learning, and memory. As your body metabolizes the alcohol during the second half of the night, a rebound effect kicks in: your nervous system shifts into a more activated state, causing frequent awakenings, lighter sleep, and fragmented rest. You may have been in bed for eight hours but gotten the restorative equivalent of far fewer.
There’s no way to retroactively fix last night’s sleep, but a short nap the next day (20 to 30 minutes) can help reduce fatigue without throwing off your next night’s sleep cycle. Caffeine can temporarily counter drowsiness, but it’s also a mild diuretic, so pair it with extra water.
Ginger for Nausea
If nausea is your dominant symptom, ginger is one of the better-studied natural remedies. It works by increasing stomach motility and gastric emptying, essentially helping your digestive system move things along rather than letting them sit. A dose of about 500 milligrams taken up to three times has shown effectiveness for nausea in clinical settings, though even ginger tea or a piece of candied ginger can help. It won’t touch the headache or fatigue, but for settling your stomach, it’s more effective than most over-the-counter options and easier on your already-irritated gut.
What You Drank Matters
Not all drinks produce equal hangovers. Darker spirits like bourbon, whiskey, red wine, and brandy contain higher levels of congeners, chemical byproducts of fermentation that your body has to process alongside the alcohol itself. These compounds contribute independently to hangover severity. Vodka is considered the “cleanest” spirit, with the fewest congeners, while bourbon sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. If you consistently get worse hangovers from dark liquor than from clear spirits at the same volume, congeners are the reason. This doesn’t mean clear drinks are hangover-proof; ethanol itself is still the primary culprit.
Supplements: What Has Evidence
The hangover supplement market is enormous, but most products lack solid evidence. One compound with real research behind it is dihydromyricetin (DHM), a flavonoid found in the Japanese raisin tree. In animal studies published in The Journal of Neuroscience, DHM counteracted alcohol intoxication and reduced withdrawal signs including anxiety and seizure susceptibility. It appears to work by blocking alcohol’s effects on the brain’s primary inhibitory receptors, essentially reducing how strongly alcohol sedates and disrupts your nervous system. DHM also blocked alcohol-induced changes in brain receptor composition that are associated with tolerance and dependence.
The catch is that most of this evidence comes from rat studies, and the doses used were delivered by injection rather than taken orally. Human trials are limited. Some people report that DHM supplements taken before or after drinking reduce next-day symptoms, but the optimal dose and timing for humans haven’t been established with the same rigor. It’s the most promising supplement candidate, but “promising” is different from “proven.”
The Recovery Timeline
Most hangovers peak in severity around the time your blood alcohol level returns to zero, which is typically the morning after a night of drinking. From that point, symptoms generally improve over the next 12 to 24 hours as inflammation subsides, your body restores its fluid and mineral balance, and your liver finishes clearing toxic byproducts. Heavier drinking sessions, darker beverages, poor sleep, and an empty stomach all push recovery toward the longer end of that window.
The most effective approach combines several strategies at once: rehydrate with electrolyte-containing fluids, eat a balanced meal, take an anti-inflammatory painkiller with food if you need one, use ginger for nausea, and rest when you can. None of these is a magic bullet on its own, but together they address the multiple overlapping problems that make a hangover feel like it will never end. Your body does the real work. You’re just giving it what it needs to do that work faster.