Poll of the Day > It's crazy how much of a hangover is just dehydration

(+) Yeah! (+)

Alcohol is a diuretic, so it makes you pee a lot. The headache you feel the day after is often your brain being shrunken.

I swear that if you force yourself to drink at least 2 full glasses of water before you sleep, you'll wake up and feel completely fine. Gatorade is even better, but if you don't have that then water is good.

Wouldn't know. Try as I might, I have never been so drunk to wake up with a hangover.
I have been drunk enough I couldn't walk over the tiny ridge in the centre of a road without falling over. I dragged myself to bed, had the best sleep ever and woke up feeling great.

In my experience, the best way to avoid a hangover is to eat a shitload of carb heavy food before going to bed. I'll usually just get a giant waffle house order

I believe they tested this on Mythbusters along with other hangover cures and drinking lots of water was indeed the most effective of them.

Indeed.

When I'm hard drinking I keep some water near.

After about three shots of Scotch I'll take a few gulps.

I can put down more and the buzz feels more relaxing.

And I've always woke up fine.

Better than I feel when I put down too much beer anyway.

Drinking a bunch of water is something you can only realistically do if you're exclusively drinking liquor. If you've drank enough beer to be hungover in the morning, a couple big glasses of water before bed might just make you throw up

whiskey and water is good. prefer whiskey and coke but always feel it way more the next day

Yellow posted...

I swear that if you force yourself to drink at least 2 full glasses of water before you sleep, you'll wake up and feel completely fine. Gatorade is even better, but if you don't have that then water is good.

When I was going to clubs back in my 20s, I used to have a "Hangover Prevention Kit" I prepared in advance - right before I went to bed, I'd drink a bottle of Gatorade and a bottle of Mountain Dew (so the caffeine could counter the depressant effect of the alcohol), and then I'd get 8 hours of sleep - and I literally never had hangovers no matter how drunk I was the night before.

Though for me it might have been the sleep more than the caffeine and fluids - the worst I've ever felt the next day after a night of hard drinking was the weekend where we got hammered on Saturday night and I stayed awake all night and into Sunday. By Sunday afternoon I was messed up bad. Whereas if I skipped the rehydration but still got a solid night of sleep I'd usually be pretty okay the next day. But both together fixed pretty much everything.

As I got older it stopped being as effective though. I wouldn't necessarily have a classic "hangover" the next day, but I would kind of feel like I was a bit wrung out, sort of like you feel when you've got sunstroke.



OhhhJa posted...

Drinking a bunch of water is something you can only realistically do if you're exclusively drinking liquor. If you've drank enough beer to be hungover in the morning, a couple big glasses of water before bed might just make you throw up.

A friend of mine used to put ice in his beer, on the theory that the extra water he was adding in would counteract the dehydrating aspect of the beer itself.

It seemed to work for him, he used to claim he never got hangovers afterwards.

My usual strategy for avoiding hangovers (aside from just not drinking that much in the first place) is to stay awake drinking water whenever I feel at all thirsty until I don't feel drunk anymore. I've had exactly one hangover in my life, and it was because I was too drunk to manage that (after two trips from the bed to the toilet, I elected to sleep on the bathroom floor).

OhhhJa posted...

Drinking a bunch of water is something you can only realistically do if you're exclusively drinking liquor. If you've drank enough beer to be hungover in the morning, a couple big glasses of water before bed might just make you throw up

which might be a good thing

I tend to drink a lot of water already so I can usually skip the water between drinks like I used to do when I didn't get enough water, it worked, I was probably more hydrated after a night of drinking than a normal day.

Anyway... I hate those times when you're drinking and go strait to feeling hungover.

I only drink on occasion but when I do it's usually a 9+ hour binge, so two glasses of water before I pass out usually doesn't do enough lol

ParanoidObsessive posted...

A friend of mine used to put ice in his beer, on the theory that the extra water he was adding in would counteract the dehydrating aspect of the beer itself.

It seemed to work for him, he used to claim he never got hangovers afterwards.

That sounds like a seasoned alcoholic lol. I'm doubting that the ice really makes much of a difference though. Beer is mostly water anyway. He probably just had a high tolerance and was good at pacing himself

OhhhJa posted...

That sounds like a seasoned alcoholic lol. I'm doubting that the ice really makes much of a difference though. Beer is mostly water anyway. He probably just had a high tolerance and was good at pacing himself

I might believe that making the beer colder could slow the absorption of the alcohol, but even that's pretty far-fetched because at best you're only going to see a difference of a couple degrees C in something that's already 30+ degrees colder than the body. It could affect sublingual absorption, but that's pretty trivial compared to what the stomach takes in.

I find that a full glass of water between each drink prevents a hangover at least 90% of the time.

There was one time I only had two drinks, not even enough to feel a buzz, and yet I had a brutal hangover the next day simply because I was dehydrated and not drinking water with it.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

When I was going to clubs back in my 20s, I used to have a "Hangover Prevention Kit" I prepared in advance - right before I went to bed, I'd drink a bottle of Gatorade and a bottle of Mountain Dew (so the caffeine could counter the depressant effect of the alcohol), and then I'd get 8 hours of sleep - and I literally never had hangovers no matter how drunk I was the night before.

Though for me it might have been the sleep more than the caffeine and fluids - the worst I've ever felt the next day after a night of hard drinking was the weekend where we got hammered on Saturday night and I stayed awake all night and into Sunday. By Sunday afternoon I was messed up bad. Whereas if I skipped the rehydration but still got a solid night of sleep I'd usually be pretty okay the next day. But both together fixed pretty much everything.

As I got older it stopped being as effective though. I wouldn't necessarily have a classic "hangover" the next day, but I would kind of feel like I was a bit wrung out, sort of like you feel when you've got sunstroke.

A friend of mine used to put ice in his beer, on the theory that the extra water he was adding in would counteract the dehydrating aspect of the beer itself.

It seemed to work for him, he used to claim he never got hangovers afterwards.

Ice in beer is a very common strategy here, not so much for the hangover but just for surviving the heat and not getting massively dehydrated after a couple of beers. Never used to do it back home but do it all the time here.

OhhhJa posted...

a couple big glasses of water before bed might just make you throw up

Or wake up in a piss-sodden bed.

Oddly enough, the most I ever drank in a day I didn't get a hangover because I was so damn thirsty. In fact, it is the only time someone said "You smell like a brewery" because of my drinking. That said, I was drinking Labbat's the whole time so that probably had something to do with it since they are mostly water anyways.

My worst hangover was also after the only time I ever threw up from drinking.