The most effective hangover relief comes from rehydrating, eating the right foods, choosing the right pain reliever, and giving your body time. A hangover typically lasts about 18 hours from your last drink, or roughly 12 hours from when you wake up, so the goal is to ease symptoms while your body finishes clearing alcohol’s toxic byproducts.
There’s no single cure, but several strategies have real science behind them. Here’s what actually works, what might help, and what to avoid.
Why You Feel This Bad
Your liver breaks alcohol down into a compound called acetaldehyde, which is significantly more toxic than alcohol itself. Acetaldehyde is eventually converted into harmless acetic acid and eliminated, but while it lingers, it drives nausea, headache, and that general feeling of being poisoned. Because that’s essentially what’s happening.
Alcohol also suppresses your liver’s ability to release stored glucose into your bloodstream. That’s why you may feel shaky, weak, and foggy the morning after. On top of that, alcohol is a diuretic, meaning you lose more fluid than you take in, pulling electrolytes along with it. The resulting dehydration contributes to headaches, fatigue, and dizziness. Your hangover symptoms actually peak after your blood alcohol level hits zero, which is when your body is dealing with the full load of leftover metabolic waste.
Rehydrate, But Not Just With Water
Water is a good start, but it doesn’t replace the sodium, potassium, and other electrolytes you lost overnight. Drinks with electrolytes (sports drinks, coconut water, or even broth) do a better job of restoring what your body actually needs. Pedialyte has become a popular choice for the same reason: it’s designed for rehydration after fluid loss.
Sip steadily rather than chugging. Your stomach is already irritated, and flooding it with liquid can make nausea worse.
What to Eat (and Why It Matters)
Your blood sugar is likely low because your liver spent the night processing alcohol instead of maintaining glucose levels. Eating a meal that combines carbohydrates, protein, and some healthy fat helps stabilize blood sugar and gives your body fuel for recovery. Eggs are a popular choice for good reason: they contain an amino acid that supports your body’s production of glutathione, a key antioxidant involved in breaking down acetaldehyde. Toast, bananas, oatmeal, or rice provide easy-to-digest carbs.
If nausea makes a full meal impossible, start small. A few crackers, a banana, or a piece of toast can get glucose into your system without overwhelming your stomach. Ginger tea or ginger chews can help settle nausea on their own.
Choose Your Pain Reliever Carefully
If your headache is unbearable, ibuprofen or aspirin can help. But be aware that both are hard on the stomach lining, which is already inflamed from alcohol. Taking them with food reduces that risk.
Avoid acetaminophen (Tylenol) while your liver is still processing alcohol. Your liver uses the same pathways to break down both acetaminophen and alcohol, and combining the two can cause serious liver damage. The FDA specifically warns people who drink regularly to be cautious with acetaminophen. This isn’t a theoretical risk. Severe cases can require a liver transplant.
Your Drink Choice Affects How Bad It Gets
Not all alcohol produces the same hangover. Darker spirits like brandy, whiskey, and red wine contain high levels of congeners, the chemical byproducts of fermentation that give drinks their color and flavor. These compounds add to the toxic load your body has to process. Brandy tops the list, with congener concentrations that can be orders of magnitude higher than lighter spirits. Whiskey and rum also rank high.
Vodka and gin sit at the other end of the spectrum, with minimal congener content. Clear rum falls somewhere in between. This doesn’t mean clear spirits are hangover-proof, since ethanol itself is the primary driver. But all else being equal, a night of bourbon will hit harder the next morning than the same amount of vodka. Beer and wine fall in the middle, with wine carrying more methanol (a particularly nasty congener) than beer.
Supplements That Show Promise
A few supplements have at least some evidence behind them, though none qualifies as a guaranteed cure.
- Dihydromyricetin (DHM): Derived from the Japanese raisin tree, DHM appears to speed up alcohol metabolism by boosting the activity of the enzymes your liver uses to break down ethanol and acetaldehyde. Research from USC found it activates a cascade of mechanisms that help the body clear alcohol and its byproducts faster. It also appears to have liver-protective effects. You’ll find it in many “anti-hangover” supplements.
- Prickly pear extract: In a double-blind clinical trial, taking prickly pear cactus extract five hours before drinking reduced the risk of severe hangover by 50%. It specifically helped with nausea, loss of appetite, and dry mouth, though it didn’t improve headache or dizziness. It needs to be taken before drinking, not the morning after.
- Vitamin B6: A small clinical trial found that people who took a form of vitamin B6 before, during, and after drinking reported significantly fewer hangover symptoms the next morning compared to placebo. The evidence is limited but worth noting.
- NAC (N-acetylcysteine): Popular among college students as a pre-drinking supplement, NAC helps your body produce glutathione, the antioxidant that neutralizes acetaldehyde. The theory is solid, but a clinical study on binge drinking found it was ineffective at reducing hangover symptoms in practice. The gap between biochemistry and real-world results is a common theme in hangover science.
What About Coffee?
Coffee can help with the fatigue and headache, especially if you’re a regular caffeine drinker whose headache is partly from caffeine withdrawal. But caffeine is also a diuretic, which can worsen dehydration. If you drink coffee, match it with extra water or an electrolyte drink. It treats symptoms without addressing the underlying cause.
Time Is the Only Real Cure
The uncomfortable truth is that most hangover symptoms resolve on their own as your body finishes metabolizing alcohol’s byproducts. For most people, that means 14 to 23 hours from the last drink, with the average sitting around 18 hours. From the time you wake up, you’re typically looking at about 12 more hours before you feel fully normal.
Everything else, hydration, food, supplements, pain relievers, is about making those hours more bearable. Sleep helps enormously, since your body does its best repair work while you’re resting. If you can sleep in and let your body work through it, that’s one of the most effective things you can do.
Prevention Beats Recovery
The strategies that prevent a bad hangover are more effective than anything you do the morning after. Eating a substantial meal before drinking slows alcohol absorption. Alternating alcoholic drinks with water reduces total alcohol intake and keeps you hydrated. Sticking to lighter-colored spirits cuts your congener exposure. And simply drinking less remains the single most reliable way to avoid a hangover, since severity scales directly with how much you consume.
If you know you’ll be drinking, taking prickly pear extract or DHM beforehand has more supporting evidence than taking anything the next day. By the time you wake up with a hangover, the damage is already done, and you’re in damage-control mode rather than prevention mode.