The most effective things you can do when you’re hungover are also the simplest: drink water, eat something, take the right pain reliever, and sleep more. Hangover symptoms peak once your blood alcohol level drops back to zero and can last 24 hours or longer, so recovery is mostly about giving your body time and the raw materials it needs to bounce back.
Why You Feel This Bad
Alcohol is a diuretic, which means it pushes fluid out of your body faster than you take it in. That dehydration drives the headache, dry mouth, and dizziness. But dehydration is only part of the story. Your liver breaks alcohol down into a toxic byproduct called acetaldehyde before converting it into something harmless. While acetaldehyde is circulating, it irritates tissues and triggers inflammation throughout your body, which is why you can feel achy and nauseated even after rehydrating.
Alcohol also forces your liver to prioritize detoxification over its other jobs, including keeping your blood sugar stable. Normally, your liver releases stored glucose between meals to keep your energy steady. When it’s busy processing alcohol, that function takes a back seat, and your blood sugar can drop. That foggy, shaky, weak feeling? Low blood sugar is a big part of it.
On top of all that, the sleep you got last night was poor. Alcohol fragments your sleep architecture, causing your brain to briefly wake up over and over throughout the night. Each of those micro-awakenings can knock you back into light sleep and cut into the deep, restorative stages your brain needs most, particularly REM sleep. So even if you were in bed for eight hours, you likely got far less quality rest than that.
Rehydrate, Then Eat
Water is your first priority. Drink a full glass as soon as you can, and keep sipping throughout the day. Sports drinks or oral rehydration solutions can help replace lost electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium), which speeds the process along. Coconut water works too.
Once your stomach can handle it, eat something. Your body needs fuel to finish clearing alcohol byproducts, and your blood sugar needs a boost. Bland, carbohydrate-rich foods like toast, crackers, oatmeal, or bananas are gentle on a sensitive stomach while giving your liver the glucose it needs to get back to normal. Eggs are a particularly good choice because they’re rich in an amino acid called L-cysteine, which helps your body neutralize acetaldehyde. Adding some fruit gives you fructose and vitamins that support recovery. Don’t force a huge meal if you’re nauseous, but try to eat something small and build from there.
Choose Your Pain Reliever Carefully
If your headache is unbearable, reach for ibuprofen or aspirin, not acetaminophen (Tylenol). Here’s why: your liver is already working overtime to clear alcohol from your system. Acetaminophen is also processed by the liver, and combining the two can strain it in a serious way. Chronic or heavy alcohol use depletes a protective compound in the liver that normally keeps acetaminophen safe. Without enough of that buffer, acetaminophen toxicity becomes a real risk. It accounts for nearly half of acute liver failure cases in North America.
Ibuprofen and aspirin are processed differently and don’t carry the same liver risk. That said, they can irritate an already-upset stomach, so take them with food and water rather than on an empty stomach.
Go Back to Sleep
Your body repairs itself during sleep, and the sleep you got last night was fragmented and shallow. If your schedule allows it, a nap is one of the single most helpful things you can do. Even a couple of extra hours of real, alcohol-free sleep lets your brain cycle through the restorative stages it missed overnight. Don’t set an alarm if you don’t need to. Your body will take what it needs.
Skip the “Hair of the Dog”
Having another drink in the morning might seem like it helps, but it doesn’t cure anything. It temporarily masks your symptoms by putting alcohol back into your system, which tricks your brain into feeling briefly better. The hangover is still coming. You’re just postponing it and adding more toxins for your liver to process. Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have been direct about this: there is no scientific evidence that drinking more alcohol cures a hangover.
What Doesn’t Work
Coffee won’t cure a hangover. Caffeine may help with the headache and grogginess, but it’s also a diuretic, so it can worsen dehydration if you’re not drinking water alongside it. Greasy food is another popular myth. A fatty meal before drinking can slow alcohol absorption, but eating greasy food the morning after doesn’t do anything special for recovery. Your stomach is already irritated, and heavy food may make nausea worse.
There’s also no supplement, IV drip, or hangover pill with strong evidence behind it. Some products contain B vitamins, electrolytes, or amino acids that may marginally help, but none of them are a shortcut past the basic formula of water, food, pain relief, and rest.
Why Some Hangovers Are Worse Than Others
The type of alcohol you drank matters. Dark liquors like bourbon, brandy, cognac, red wine, and dark whiskey contain high levels of compounds called congeners, which are chemical byproducts of fermentation. Tequila is also high in congeners despite being lighter in color. These substances contribute to more severe hangovers. Clear drinks like vodka, gin, white wine, light rum, and light beer have significantly fewer congeners, which generally means milder after-effects.
The other major factors are straightforward: how much you drank, how quickly you drank it, whether you ate beforehand, how hydrated you were going in, and your individual biology. Smaller bodies process alcohol more slowly. People with a family history of alcohol use disorder often experience worse hangovers. And hangovers tend to get more punishing with age, partly because liver efficiency and overall recovery slow down over time.
A Practical Recovery Timeline
Most hangovers follow a predictable arc. Symptoms are worst in the first few hours after your blood alcohol hits zero, which for a night of heavy drinking is typically the morning after. Nausea, headache, and sensitivity to light and sound tend to peak during this window. By midday or early afternoon, the worst is usually fading if you’ve been hydrating and resting. By evening, most people feel significantly better, though fatigue and brain fog can linger.
For particularly heavy nights, symptoms can stretch a full 24 hours or longer. If you’re still vomiting after several hours, can’t keep water down, or notice confusion, rapid heartbeat, or seizures, that’s beyond a normal hangover and needs medical attention. Otherwise, time is the only real cure. Your liver processes roughly one standard drink per hour, and there’s no way to speed that up. The best thing you can do is stop adding to the workload and let your body finish the job.