The most effective things you can do when you’re hungover are drink fluids, eat something, take the right pain reliever, and rest. There’s no instant cure, but you can meaningfully shorten your misery and avoid making it worse. Hangover symptoms typically peak 12 to 14 hours after you started drinking and can linger for up to 20 hours, so the strategies below are about speeding your body through that window as comfortably as possible.
Why You Feel This Bad
A hangover isn’t just dehydration, though that’s part of it. Alcohol triggers your body’s inflammatory response, raising the same immune-signaling molecules that spike when you’re fighting an infection. Blood levels of these inflammatory markers correlate directly with how severe your hangover feels the next day. Meanwhile, alcohol itself (not just its breakdown products, as scientists once assumed) crosses into the brain and disrupts normal function. The slower your body clears alcohol from your blood, the more of it reaches your brain and the worse the hangover.
On top of that, alcohol is a diuretic. It suppresses the hormone that tells your kidneys to hold onto water, so you lose fluid and electrolytes faster than you realize. By morning, you’re dehydrated, inflamed, and running on poor sleep. Every remedy below targets at least one of those problems.
Start With Fluids, but Not Just Water
Water is a good start, but you’ve also lost sodium, potassium, and magnesium overnight. A drink that replaces electrolytes (a sports drink, coconut water, or even broth) will rehydrate you faster than plain water alone. Sip steadily rather than chugging a huge amount at once, which can make nausea worse.
If you’re vomiting and can’t keep fluids down for several hours, that changes the situation from a hangover to something that may need medical attention, especially if you notice confusion or a rapid heartbeat.
Eat Something, Even If You Don’t Want To
Your blood sugar is likely low, and an empty stomach amplifies nausea. Complex carbohydrates like toast, oatmeal, crackers, or bananas give your body easy fuel without demanding much from your digestive system. Adding a source of protein (eggs, yogurt, nuts) provides the amino acid cysteine, which plays a role in supporting your body’s detox pathways and gut lining repair. Meat, dairy, legumes, and nuts are all good sources.
Greasy “hangover food” isn’t harmful, but it doesn’t have any special healing power either. If a heavy meal sounds appealing and your stomach can handle it, go ahead. If it doesn’t, stick with bland carbs and work your way up.
Choose Your Pain Reliever Carefully
This is the one place where picking the wrong option can actually hurt you. Acetaminophen (Tylenol) combined with alcohol in your system can cause serious liver damage. Your liver is already working overtime to process the alcohol, and adding acetaminophen stresses it further. Avoid it while hungover.
Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) or aspirin are safer choices for a headache, but both can irritate your stomach lining, which alcohol has already inflamed. Take them with food and water, and stick to a standard dose. If your stomach is already in rough shape, you may want to skip pain relievers entirely and rely on fluids and rest.
What Actually Helps (and What Doesn’t)
A few remedies have at least some evidence behind them:
- Sleep. Your body does most of its repair work during rest, and alcohol wrecks sleep quality. Even a nap helps.
- Prickly pear extract. In a clinical trial published in JAMA Internal Medicine, taking prickly pear cactus extract five hours before drinking cut the risk of a severe hangover roughly in half. It significantly reduced nausea, dry mouth, and loss of appetite, and lowered a key inflammation marker by about 40% compared to placebo. The catch: you have to take it before you drink, not after.
- Coffee or tea. Caffeine won’t cure a hangover, but if you’re a regular caffeine drinker, skipping it will add a caffeine-withdrawal headache on top of everything else. A small cup can help with alertness and headache. Just pair it with water since caffeine is also a mild diuretic.
And the things that don’t work:
- “Hair of the dog” (drinking more alcohol). This appears to work temporarily because new alcohol blocks the metabolism of methanol, a trace compound in many drinks, postponing symptoms rather than resolving them. You’re just delaying the hangover and adding more toxins for your body to process. Regularly using this strategy is also a warning sign of problem drinking.
- Activated charcoal. Alcohol is absorbed too quickly for charcoal to bind it. By the time you’re hungover, there’s nothing left in your stomach for it to do.
- IV drip bars. These are essentially expensive saline with vitamins. Drinking fluids with electrolytes accomplishes roughly the same thing at a fraction of the cost.
How Long a Hangover Actually Lasts
Symptoms generally appear six to eight hours after you stop drinking, peak around 12 to 14 hours after you first started, and can persist for up to 20 hours total. That timeline shifts depending on how much you drank, how fast you drank it, your body size, and your genetics. If you’re still feeling severely ill after 24 hours, something else may be going on.
Prevent the Next One
The only guaranteed way to avoid a hangover is to not drink, but if you do drink, a few things reliably reduce severity. Darker liquors like bourbon and whiskey contain higher levels of congeners, chemical byproducts of fermentation that make hangovers worse. In controlled studies, bourbon produced significantly more severe hangovers than vodka, which has very few congeners. Choosing lighter-colored drinks won’t eliminate a hangover, but it tilts the odds in your favor.
Eating a full meal before drinking slows alcohol absorption. Alternating every alcoholic drink with a glass of water reduces total alcohol intake and keeps you more hydrated. And pacing matters enormously. Your liver processes roughly one standard drink per hour. Anything faster than that means alcohol is accumulating in your blood, pushing your hangover severity higher.
When a Hangover Might Be Something Worse
A regular hangover is miserable but not dangerous. Alcohol poisoning is. If someone is unconscious or unresponsive, breathing fewer than eight times per minute, has dangerously low body temperature, or shifts rapidly from alert to unresponsive, that’s a medical emergency. Don’t wait to see if they “sleep it off.” Call emergency services. The line between a severe hangover and alcohol poisoning can be blurry, and erring on the side of caution is always the right call.