The most effective things you can do for a hangover are rehydrate with electrolytes, eat something, take the right pain reliever (not Tylenol), and wait it out. Hangover symptoms peak once your blood alcohol level drops back to zero and can linger for up to 24 hours. There’s no instant cure, but the strategies below will meaningfully shorten your misery and help your body recover faster.
Why You Feel This Bad
When your liver processes alcohol, it first converts it into a toxic compound called acetaldehyde. Normally, a second enzyme breaks that down quickly and clears it from your system. But when you drink heavily, that cleanup process gets overwhelmed, and acetaldehyde builds up. This is the molecule most responsible for nausea, headache, and the general feeling that your body is punishing you.
On top of that, your immune system reacts to a night of heavy drinking much like it reacts to an infection. Blood levels of several inflammatory signaling molecules rise significantly during a hangover, which contributes to fatigue, nausea, and body aches. Alcohol also suppresses a hormone that helps your kidneys retain water, so you lose far more fluid than normal. The result is a combination of toxic buildup, inflammation, and dehydration hitting you all at once.
Rehydrate With More Than Water
Drinking water helps, but drinks containing electrolytes, specifically sodium, potassium, and a small amount of sugar, rehydrate you faster than water alone. These ingredients help your intestines absorb fluid more efficiently. Oral rehydration solutions, electrolyte packets, or even a sports drink will all outperform plain water here.
Start drinking fluids as soon as you wake up and keep sipping throughout the day. If your stomach is too unsettled to handle large gulps, take small, frequent sips. Broth is another good option because it delivers sodium and fluid in a form that’s easy on a queasy stomach.
Eat Something, Especially Protein
Food helps stabilize your blood sugar, which drops after heavy drinking and contributes to shakiness, weakness, and irritability. Bland, easy-to-digest foods like toast, crackers, or bananas are a safe starting point if your stomach is fragile.
If you can handle a real meal, eggs are a particularly good choice. They’re rich in an amino acid called L-cysteine, which your body uses to produce glutathione, a compound that directly neutralizes acetaldehyde. Research has shown that L-cysteine reduces the cell damage and oxidative stress caused by acetaldehyde and helps relieve nausea, headache, fatigue, and anxiety after drinking. Your liver’s glutathione stores get depleted during heavy alcohol metabolism, so giving your body the raw materials to make more is genuinely useful.
Take the Right Pain Reliever
For a hangover headache, reach for ibuprofen (Advil), aspirin, or naproxen (Aleve). These anti-inflammatory pain relievers also work against the inflammatory compounds your immune system is producing during the hangover state.
Do not take acetaminophen (Tylenol or Excedrin). Both acetaminophen and alcohol are processed by your liver using the same protective compound, glutathione. Heavy drinking depletes your glutathione stores, which means your liver has less capacity to safely handle acetaminophen. The combination can cause serious liver damage. According to Cleveland Clinic, acetaminophen toxicity accounts for nearly half of acute liver failure cases in North America. The risk is highest for people who drink regularly, but even a single night of heavy drinking followed by acetaminophen is worth avoiding.
Sleep and Rest
Alcohol disrupts sleep quality even when it helps you fall asleep initially. You likely got less restorative deep sleep than normal, which is why you feel mentally foggy and exhausted on top of everything else. If you can, go back to sleep or at least rest. Your body does its best repair work when you’re not asking it to do anything else. There’s no substitute for giving your system time to clear the remaining toxins and bring inflammation back down.
What Doesn’t Work
“Hair of the Dog”
Drinking more alcohol the next morning doesn’t cure a hangover. It temporarily masks symptoms by putting alcohol back into your system, but those symptoms will return once the new alcohol is metabolized. As researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have put it, it postpones the hangover rather than treating it. Over time, relying on morning drinks to manage hangovers is also a pattern that can progress toward alcohol dependence.
Coffee
Caffeine won’t speed up alcohol metabolism or clear acetaldehyde from your system. It may temporarily reduce the sensation of fatigue, but it’s also a mild diuretic, which can worsen dehydration if you’re not drinking enough fluids alongside it. If you’re a regular coffee drinker, a small cup to prevent a caffeine withdrawal headache on top of your hangover is reasonable. Just pair it with water or an electrolyte drink.
Greasy Breakfast Before Drinking
Eating a large meal before drinking does slow alcohol absorption, which can reduce how drunk you get. But eating greasy food the morning after does nothing to reverse the damage already done. At that point, your body needs hydration, gentle nutrition, and time, not a plate of cheese fries.
Supplements Worth Knowing About
Dihydromyricetin (DHM) is a plant compound that has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries and is now the active ingredient in many commercial hangover supplements. Research supports its antioxidant activity and its ability to reduce alcohol-related fat accumulation and inflammation in the liver. Most products recommend taking it before, during, and after drinking. The evidence is promising but still limited in human trials, so set your expectations accordingly.
L-cysteine supplements, usually sold as N-acetyl cysteine (NAC), work through the same glutathione pathway as the L-cysteine in eggs. Some people take NAC before drinking to give their liver a head start on acetaldehyde clearance. If you’re going to try it, taking it before or during drinking is more useful than taking it the next morning, when the damage is already done.
How Long This Will Last
Hangover symptoms hit their worst point once your blood alcohol concentration returns to zero, which for most people is sometime the morning after a night of heavy drinking. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, symptoms can persist for 24 hours or longer depending on how much you drank, your body weight, hydration status, and how well your liver processes acetaldehyde. People of East Asian descent are more likely to have a genetic variation that slows acetaldehyde breakdown, which can make hangovers more severe.
Most people start feeling noticeably better by mid-afternoon if they’re staying hydrated and eating. By the following morning, the vast majority of hangovers have fully resolved. If symptoms like vomiting, confusion, or severe abdominal pain persist beyond 24 hours, that’s a sign something more serious may be going on.