If you’ve had too much to drink, the most important things are to stop drinking immediately, start sipping water, and assess whether you or the person you’re with needs emergency help. Your liver processes roughly one standard drink per hour, and nothing speeds that up. The path forward is keeping yourself safe while your body does its work.
Recognize When It’s an Emergency
There’s a meaningful difference between feeling drunk and experiencing alcohol poisoning. Alcohol poisoning affects breathing, heart rate, body temperature, and the gag reflex. If you or someone else shows any of these signs, call 911:
- Irregular breathing with gaps of 10 seconds or more between breaths
- Unconsciousness or inability to wake up
- Vomiting while passed out, which creates a choking risk because alcohol suppresses the gag reflex
- Low body temperature, including pale or bluish skin, which can progress to cardiac arrest
- Severe confusion beyond normal intoxication
A person who has passed out from alcohol poisoning and can’t be woken up could die. Don’t assume they’ll “sleep it off.”
How to Help Someone Who’s Passed Out
If someone is unconscious but breathing, roll them onto their side to prevent choking if they vomit. Stanford University’s health services recommends a technique sometimes called the Bacchus maneuver: raise the arm closest to you above their head, gently roll them toward you while protecting their head, then tilt the head up slightly to keep the airway open. Tuck their hand under their cheek to keep the face off the floor and the head tilted.
Do not attempt to reposition someone who may have fallen and injured their spine. Stay with them and call for help. Never leave an unconscious intoxicated person alone.
Nothing Actually Speeds Up Sobering
Your liver metabolizes about one standard drink per hour. One standard drink means 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine, or 1.5 ounces of liquor. That rate is essentially fixed. If you’ve had six drinks, you’re looking at roughly six hours before your body clears the alcohol.
Coffee, cold showers, fresh air, and exercise do not change this timeline. Coffee might make you feel more alert, but it doesn’t lower your blood alcohol level. A cold shower may feel bracing, but your liver works at the same pace regardless. The only thing that sobers you up is time.
What to Drink and Eat
Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning it pulls water out of your body faster than normal. This is why you urinate more when drinking and wake up feeling terrible. Heavy drinking depletes several key electrolytes, particularly magnesium, potassium, sodium, and calcium. Plain water helps, but drinks that contain electrolytes (like sports drinks, coconut water, or oral rehydration solutions) replace what alcohol actually stripped away.
Sip fluids slowly rather than chugging. If your stomach is already upset, large volumes of liquid at once can trigger vomiting, which makes dehydration worse.
Alcohol also interferes with your liver’s ability to release stored sugar into your bloodstream, which can leave you shaky, weak, and lightheaded. Eating bland carbohydrates like toast, crackers, or bananas helps stabilize blood sugar. This is especially important if you haven’t eaten in a while or if you feel unusually dizzy or faint. Avoid greasy or heavy foods if your stomach is already rebelling.
Choosing the Right Pain Reliever
A splitting headache is one of the most common reasons people reach for medication after drinking too much, but what you choose matters.
Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is processed by your liver, the same organ working overtime to clear alcohol from your system. Both substances use a protective compound called glutathione to neutralize their toxic byproducts. In most cases, taking a normal dose of acetaminophen the day after drinking is fine. “Normal” means up to 1,000 milligrams over four to six hours and no more than 4,000 milligrams in a day. But if you drink heavily on a regular basis, the Cleveland Clinic recommends keeping acetaminophen doses under 2,000 milligrams per day and using it only occasionally. People with liver disease should avoid it altogether.
Ibuprofen and aspirin carry a different risk. These anti-inflammatory painkillers irritate the stomach lining, and alcohol does the same thing. Together, they significantly increase the risk of upper gastrointestinal bleeding. If your stomach already feels raw, adding ibuprofen or aspirin can make things considerably worse. For an occasional drinker nursing a hangover, a standard dose of ibuprofen taken with food is generally tolerable. But for frequent or heavy drinkers, neither option is without risk.
Why Your Sleep Feels Terrible
You might fall asleep quickly after drinking, but the quality of that sleep is poor. Alcohol sedates you into deeper sleep during the first few hours, but it suppresses REM sleep, the restorative phase your brain needs most. In the second half of the night, as your body finishes processing the alcohol, sleep becomes fragmented. You wake up more often, spend more time in the lightest sleep stage, and feel unrested even after a full night in bed.
This is why sleeping off a heavy night of drinking often leaves you groggy and foggy the next day. Your brain didn’t get the repair time it needed. Napping the following afternoon can help, but don’t expect one night of normal sleep to fully reverse the deficit. If you’re feeling wiped out, give yourself permission to rest. Staying hydrated and eating will help more than pushing through the day on caffeine alone.
The Hours After: A Practical Timeline
For the first one to two hours after your last drink, your blood alcohol level may still be rising, especially if you drank quickly or on an empty stomach. This is the window where alcohol poisoning risk is highest. Stay somewhere safe, stay with people, and keep sipping water.
Over the next several hours, your liver steadily clears the alcohol at its fixed rate. You may feel nauseous, dizzy, or anxious during this time. These are normal effects of your body processing a toxin. Vomiting, while unpleasant, is your body’s way of limiting how much alcohol gets absorbed. Don’t try to force yourself to vomit, but if it happens naturally, rinse your mouth with water afterward to protect your teeth from stomach acid.
By the next morning, most of the alcohol is likely gone, but the hangover is in full swing. Hangover symptoms, including headache, nausea, fatigue, and sensitivity to light, are driven by dehydration, electrolyte loss, stomach irritation, and disrupted sleep. There’s no instant cure. The combination of fluids, electrolytes, bland food, rest, and time is genuinely the best approach. Most hangovers resolve within 24 hours, though heavier episodes can linger longer.
How Much Is “Too Much”
It helps to know what you’re actually measuring. One standard drink in the U.S. is 12 ounces of beer at 5% alcohol, 5 ounces of wine at 12%, or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits at 40%. Many cocktails contain two or three standard drinks in a single glass. A generous pour of wine at home is often closer to 8 ounces than 5.
Binge drinking is defined as reaching a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% or higher, which typically happens after about four drinks for women or five for men within two hours. If you regularly find yourself past that threshold, or if you’re searching for what to do after drinking too much more than occasionally, that pattern itself is worth paying attention to.