The best things you can do for a bad hangover are drink fluids, eat something, take an anti-inflammatory painkiller, and wait it out. Hangover symptoms peak right around the time your blood alcohol level drops back to zero and can last 24 hours or longer. There’s no instant cure, but several strategies can meaningfully reduce how miserable those hours feel.
Why You Feel This Bad
A hangover isn’t just dehydration, though that’s part of it. When your body breaks down alcohol, it produces a toxic byproduct that’s roughly 30 times more toxic than alcohol itself. Your liver works to clear it, but after heavy drinking, it can’t keep up. Meanwhile, your immune system kicks into gear almost immediately. Within 20 minutes of your first drink, your body starts releasing inflammatory molecules that interact with your central nervous system, producing that full-body ache, brain fog, and fatigue you’re feeling now.
Alcohol also suppresses a brain chemical that normally keeps you alert and focused. Once you stop drinking, your brain overcompensates by flooding itself with that chemical, which is why you might have woken up anxious, restless, or unable to fall back asleep despite being exhausted. All of these processes overlap and compound each other, which is why hangovers hit so many systems at once: stomach, head, muscles, mood.
Start With Fluids, but Not Just Water
Alcohol increases urine output and you likely lost more fluid than usual overnight. Plain water helps, but drinks containing sodium and potassium will restore what your kidneys flushed out. Sports drinks, coconut water, or even broth all work well. Pedialyte or similar oral rehydration solutions contain a balanced ratio of electrolytes and are a solid option if you have them on hand.
Sip steadily rather than gulping large amounts at once, especially if your stomach is already upset. Aim to drink at least a few glasses over the first couple of hours after waking. If plain water is all you have, that’s fine. Pair it with salty food to help your body retain the fluid instead of passing it straight through.
Choose the Right Painkiller
For a pounding headache, an anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen or aspirin is your safest bet. These reduce the inflammatory response that’s contributing to your symptoms. Avoid acetaminophen (Tylenol) if you can. While a single normal dose after a night of drinking is unlikely to cause liver damage in most people, acetaminophen is processed by the same liver pathways that are already working overtime to clear alcohol byproducts. If you drink heavily on a regular basis, the Cleveland Clinic recommends keeping daily acetaminophen doses below 2,000 mg, and people with any history of liver disease should avoid it entirely after drinking.
One caution with ibuprofen and aspirin: they can irritate an already-angry stomach lining. If nausea is your dominant symptom, taking a painkiller on an empty stomach may make things worse. Eat something first, even if it’s just crackers.
What to Eat (and Why Eggs Are a Good Call)
Your body needs fuel to finish processing what’s left of last night’s alcohol. Simple, bland foods are the easiest starting point: toast, rice, bananas. But if you can handle something more substantial, eggs are one of the better hangover foods for a specific reason. They’re rich in an amino acid called cysteine, which your body uses to produce glutathione, a compound that helps neutralize the toxic byproducts of alcohol metabolism. Meat, fish, and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower are also high in the sulfur-containing amino acids that support this process.
Fruit and fruit juice may offer a small extra benefit. Fructose, the sugar in fruit, appears to help your body clear alcohol slightly faster than other sugars. One study found that fructose shortened the time alcohol was detectable in participants’ breath by about 30 minutes compared to glucose. That’s modest, but when you’re counting the hours until you feel human again, it’s something. A glass of orange juice or a banana alongside your breakfast pulls double duty: fructose plus potassium.
Settling Your Stomach
Nausea is often the hardest symptom to push through. Ginger is one of the most reliable natural options for calming an upset stomach. Ginger tea, ginger chews, or flat ginger ale (the real kind, not just ginger-flavored) can all help. Small, frequent sips of any liquid tend to stay down better than large gulps.
Avoid greasy, heavy food if nausea is severe. The classic “greasy breakfast” cure works better as prevention (fat slows alcohol absorption if eaten before drinking) than as treatment the morning after, when your stomach lining is already inflamed. Start bland and work your way up as your stomach settles.
What Doesn’t Work
“Hair of the dog,” or drinking more alcohol to ease a hangover, is one of the most persistent myths. There’s a chemical explanation for why it seems to help briefly: your body converts small amounts of methanol (present in many drinks) into a toxic substance, and drinking more alcohol temporarily blocks that conversion. But you’re just postponing the inevitable. Once your body finishes processing the new alcohol, the same symptoms return, often worse. Regularly using this strategy is also a well-documented warning sign for developing alcohol dependence.
IV hydration clinics have become popular in some cities, marketing drip bags of saline and vitamins as hangover cures. These treatments aren’t FDA-approved, and there’s no clinically validated evidence that IV hydration offers any real advantage over simply drinking fluids and eating. You’re paying hundreds of dollars for something your digestive system can handle on its own.
Why Some Nights Hit Harder
If you’ve noticed that certain drinks leave you worse off than others, you’re not imagining it. Darker spirits contain higher levels of congeners, chemical byproducts of fermentation that your body has to process alongside the alcohol itself. Brandy tops the list, with methanol levels reaching nearly 4,800 milligrams per liter. Red wine and rum are also high. Vodka and beer sit at the opposite end, with far fewer congeners. A 2010 study confirmed this effect directly: participants who drank bourbon reported significantly worse hangovers than those who drank the same amount of vodka.
More distilled spirits generally contain fewer congeners, which is one reason people sometimes report feeling better after drinking higher-quality liquor. It’s not just placebo. That said, the amount of alcohol consumed still matters far more than the type. No congener level saves you from drinking too much.
A Realistic Timeline
Most hangover symptoms peak when your blood alcohol level hits zero, which for a heavy night of drinking can be late the following morning or even afternoon. From there, symptoms typically improve gradually over the next several hours, though they can persist for a full 24 hours or longer after your last drink. The severity depends on how much you drank, how quickly, whether you ate beforehand, your body size, and your individual biology. Some people’s immune systems mount a stronger inflammatory response to alcohol than others, which partly explains why two people can drink the same amount and feel very differently the next day.
Sleep helps more than almost anything else. Alcohol disrupts sleep architecture, so even if you slept for eight hours, you likely didn’t get quality rest. A nap in the afternoon, once the worst of the nausea has passed, can accelerate recovery noticeably. Keep water by the bed, eat when you can, and give your body the time it needs to finish the cleanup.