1. What is a Hangover Anyway?

Not suprisingly, medical science is unable to provide a precise, equivocal answer to exactly what a hangover is. The best answer yet provided is that a hangover is a collection of symptoms produced by a variety of conditions that are the direct result of your choices the night before. Helpful, huh? Well, we’ll dig into what exactly these ‘conditions’ are and what we can do to eliminate or minimize them. If you’ve found this article in search of hangover cures, scroll down – we’ve got loads of them for you.

2. Hangover Symptoms and Causes

Ok, so a hangover is a collection of symptoms produced as a result of specific conditions in the body, right? Let us now take a look at the most common symptoms and what may be causing them.

Hangover Causes

• Thirst: This one’s a no-brainer. Alcohol causes dehydration. Dehydration causes thirst.
• Fatigue: When you saturate your body with alcohol, it must then devote a lot of vitamins, minerals, and energy into metabolizing it, sapping resources from normal functions and reducing the restfulness of sleep. Alcohol also drops your blood-sugar which will produce fatigue.
• Headaches: Often, headaches are associated with dehydration. Congeners are also believed to contribute to this. Congeners are chemicals produced during the manufacture of certain types of alcohol (Dark liquors have the highest concentrations).
• Nausea and Stomach Discomfort: Alcohol irritates your entire digestive tract. Not surprisingly it can leave you very sensitive the next morning.

There are more of course, but these are the most common ones. Keep reading for some tips on preventing them in the future followed by methods to get rid of a hangover when it’s too late for prevention.

3. Preventing a Hangover

First things first - NEVER take acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or other painkillers before bed after you’ve been drinking. This places additional stress on your already stressed liver and can cause it to release even more toxins into your bloodstream. With that out of the way, let’s have a look at some commonly used methods of preventing a hangover.

Hangover Prevention

• Eat – Eat something hearty before or during your drinking session. This slows your alcohol absorption and provide some nutrients.
• Limit your consumption of congeners – Darker liquors tend to contain more congeners then lighter and clear liquors. Congeners are chemicals produced during the fermentation process and are toxic to us humans.
• Stick to one type of drink – Don’t mix! If you start off by drinking Vodka, don’t change whisky or you run the risk of getting sick and suffering a bad hangover the next morning.
• Drink plenty of water – Drink one glass of water between each alcoholic drink to keep yourself hydrated. You’ll pee a lot, but you will feel much better in the long run for doing it. Drink a large glass of water before going to sleep too.
• Stay up – After you’re done partying, stay up a few hours until the alcohol starts wearing off. This will give you time to re-hydrate, get little real food in your stomach, and ‘expel’ much of the poison you’ve ingested, making your sleep higher quality.
• Set your alarm clock – I know, I know… why would you want to get up early?!?! You want to get up early so you can go pee, take a multivitamin, and drink a biiig glass of water (some V8 is good too) – then go back to bed. This will vastly improve your chances of waking up without pain, and you’ll probably not even remember doing it.

Whenever you wake up with a bad hangover, it’s a good idea to take note of what you did the night before and not do it again. Common sense, right?

4. How to Cure a Hangover

So it’s too late for prevention and you’re reading this page through squinted eyes with a pounding headache hoping to find sweet hangover relief. Have no fear, we’ve collected some great hangover remedies here – take your pick and let us know how it works out. Also feel free to leave your own hangover cure using the form at the bottom of the page if it isn’t already here.

Hangover Cures

• Hair of the dog – Some folks advocate having a small alcoholic beverage soon after waking. While it is true that this will stop the pain – the relief is only temporary. As soon as the alcohol passes the hangover will be back.
• Re-hydrate – Start off the morning with a big glass of water, Pedialite or Gatorade.
• Eat something light – Eat something easy to digest like toast, crackers, or oatmeal. Foods that are touted for their properties as hangover cures are:
  • Menudo
  • Bananas
  • Apples
  • Miso Soup
  • Honey (in tea or on toast)
  • V8
  • Pickles and/or pickle juice (yummmm)
  • Green Tea
• Take a pain-reliever – Read the label carefully first, and make sure all alcohol is out of your system. Some recommended for curing a hangover are:
  • Acetaminophen (Tylenol)
  • Ibuprofen
  • Alka-seltzer Morning Relief
  • “Chaser”
• Take a multivitamin
• Shower, eat light, drink water, and go back to bed
• Exercise! – Probably the last thing you want to do, but some mild exercise will get your heart and lymphatic system pumping, moving out waste products that have built up from the night before. This will increase your metabolism, release endorphins (natural pain-killers), and re-oxygenate your blood. Eat some carbs and protein afterwards.

Please share any more hangover cures for other surfing sufferers by using the form below.

5. Additional Hangover Resources

• The Mayo Clinic’s take on hangovers
• Alcohol complications
• Drinking too much?