Tag Archives: Hangover

Health & Fitness, Rant

How to beat a Hangover

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Tonight’s party can be tomorrow’s nightmare. While heavy consumption of alcohol can liven up even the most boring parties, it can make the next day horrible and completely un-productive and make your head feel like a throbbing mass of shit.
Being a victim of this phenomena many times, I have found out a few ways you can salvage the next day.
First of all, we must know why a Hangover occurs. A hangover is simply dehydration (loss of water and salt from cells) caused due to alcohol.  Dehydration is caused by alcohol’s ability to inhibit the effect of anti-diuretic hormone on kidney tubules, which leads to a hyperosmolar state, which in turn causes shrinking of (by loss of water) the brain cells which causes hangover. Here’re a few tips which can be observed (while still proving to your friends that you’re a man) during and after Alcohol consumption


During:-

  1. Drink large quantities of water. Alcohol consumption does cause excessive urination, and drinking even more water will cause even more frequent urination, but it does help. I generally have one glass of water after every full mug of Beer (or a peg of vodka/whiskey).
  2. Don’t mix different drink types or different types of the same drink type (Hop-based beer with wheat-based beer, beer with vodka, beer with wine etc.)
  3. Eat well. Prefer starchy slow-digesting foods like rice and potato, just don’t sleep empty stomached.
 
After(If you already had too much to drink and now its time to go home):-
 
  1. If you feel nauseous and feel like you want to throw up, do so. Don’t hold the vomit back; instead let go and remove all the excess alcohol from your stomach. This will not only reduce the hangover duration, but will also lead to a good night’s sleep. Do remember to re-hydrate yourself properly though.
  2. Keep a bottle of Gatorade (or similar) next to your bed. You are bound to wake up at night to urinate /feeling thirsty and drinking Gatorade helps. If possible, keep a couple of Dispirins (Aspirin) next to the bed as well and have them during one of the mid-sleep urine sessions. Most of the times, I feel this cures the headache by the time you wake up.
  3. Have plenty of fluids and salts the next day. Avoid having more diuretics like coffee and soft drinks; which will cause more de-hydration.
  4. Do some light exercise. Go running (not in the heat) or do some cardios. This will increase the metabolism rate of your body and metabolize the alcohol faster.
Consuming a large quantity of plain water may cause it to drain more salts out of the body causing a salt imbalance in cells. If Gatorade is not present, Lemonade helps (with lots of salt). 
 
After a lot of unpleasant hangover days, I feel that these days I can get rid of my hangover by the time I wake up or by mid-afternoon max(If I have passed out and don’t wake up in the middle of the night). 
 
Hope this helps a few people out.
Rant

Alcohol blues

2 Comments

I really envy those people who, after having enormous quantities of alcohol just pass out and then sleep for hours without any care in the world. I, myself am not so lucky. Each time I have a lot of alcohol, especially a cocktail of different types, after a disturbed sleep of a few hours, I wake up with a headache and a hunger unable to sleep anymore however hard I try. The few hours of sleep I get are full of bad dreams(my bike being stolen, my bike’s engine seizing, my guitar dying) and I’m tossing and turning most of the time. I have tried everything, anti hangover pills, eating a lot, eating a lot of rice, saturating myself with water, sucking lemons(though I like doing that anyways) nothing seems to help. The whole day after that, I feel tired and exhausted and i yawn all the time. I’ve learnt with experience that during such times, instead of trying to sleep, I should just wake up and do stuff and sleep later. Today’s one of those days. My eyes are hurting, my stomach is hurting with hunger and my head is hurting. There’s nothing to eat at home and I’m too lazy to go out. I guess I’ll just read my book.