It’s that time of the year again when partying day in and day out is unavoidable. Chances are if you are celebrating, it will include a lot of booze. Drinking alcohol, particularly to an extreme, can be joined by different aftereffects.
A hangover is the most widely recognised one, with symptoms including weakness, migraine, sickness, tipsiness, thirst and affectability to light or sound.
While there’s no lack of implied hangover cures, going from chugging a glass of pickle juice to focusing on lemon on your armpit prior to drinking, not many of them are upheld by science.
What Does A Hangover Feel Like?
The symptoms of a hangover usually start when your blood alcohol content falls significantly and reaches or is near zero. This usually occurs in the morning after a night of heavy drinking. The following may be the possible symptoms based on the quantity you have drank:
- Weakness and fatigue
- Excessive thirst, causing a dry mouth
- Muscle ache
- Headache
- Stomach pain
- Nausea and vomiting
- Poor or reduced sleep
- Rapid heartbeat
- Dizziness
- Inability to concentrate
- Mood disturbances like anxiety, depression, and irritability
- Increased sensitivity to light and sound
What Causes A Hangover?
Now that we have talked about what is a hangover, let’s get talking about its causes. In one sentence, hangovers happen due to excessive drinking of alcohol. While, for some people, one drink is sufficient to make them tipsy, for others, even heavy drinking does not make them get a hangover.
Some prominent causes of hangovers can be:
- Alcohol makes your body produce more urine, which leads to dehydration. This, in turn, causes dry mouth, dizziness and other effects
- Alcohol may cause an inflammatory response from your immune system This may trigger specific agents that cause symptoms like inability to focus, reduced appetite, and loss of interest in daily activities
- Alcohol can trigger a fall in blood sugar that manifests through symptoms like weakness, mood disturbances and even seizures
- Alcohol may cause the expansion of your blood vessels, which can lead to headaches
- Alcohol causes irritation to the stomach lining by increasing the production of stomach acids. This can lead to symptoms like nausea, vomiting, and stomach pain.
- Alcohol can increase sleep, but it impedes deeper stages of sleep. It can also cause a lack of sleep in the middle of the night, leading to tiredness and grogginess.
5 Simple Home Remedies For Hangovers That Are Quite Effective
Are you having a bad headache after drinking or some other symptoms? Here are 5 hangover remedies that will teach you how to deal with hangovers.
1. Eat A Good Breakfast
Having a generous breakfast is one of the most notable hangover cures and one of the most important home remedies for hangovers. One explanation is that a decent breakfast can assist with keeping up with your glucose levels. Albeit low glucose levels are not really the reason for a hangover, they’re regularly connected with it. Low glucose could likewise add to some hangover symptoms, like queasiness, weariness and shortcomings.
Excessive drinking can throw off the balance of the chemicals in your blood and cause metabolic acidosis, which is characterised by an increase in acidity. It could be associated with symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and fatigue As well as decreasing specific hangover symptoms, having a sound breakfast can give significant nutrients and minerals, which might become exhausted with exorbitant alcohol admission.
2. Get A Good Night’s Sleep
This is an important hangover headache cure. Alcohol can cause rest disturbances and might be related to diminished rest quality and term for certain people. However, low to direct measures of alcohol may at first advance rest, concentrating on showing that higher sums and ongoing use can eventually upset rest designs.
While an absence of rest doesn’t cause a hangover, it can aggravate your hangover. Weariness, migraines and crabbiness are all hangover symptoms that can be exacerbated by an absence of rest. Getting a decent night’s rest and permitting your body to recuperate is an essential hangover cure that may assist with reducing symptoms and making a hangover headache more endurable.
3. Stay Hydrated
Drinking alcohol can prompt dehydration in one or two ways, making it one of the leading home remedies for hangovers. To begin with, alcohol has a diuretic impact. This means alcohol increases the production of urine, leading to a loss of fluids and electrolytes that are needed for normal functioning. Second, excessive amounts of alcohol can cause vomiting, leading to an even further loss of fluids and electrolytes.
In spite of the fact that dehydration isn’t the main source of a hangover, it adds to a considerable lot of its symptoms, like expanded thirst, weakness, cerebral pain and dizziness. Expanding your water admission might assist with mitigating a few symptoms of hangovers and even forestall them by and large.
When drinking alcohol, a decent guideline is to switch back and forth between a glass of water and a beverage. However this will not really forestall dehydration, it can assist you with directing your alcohol admission. Thereafter, remain hydrated for the duration of the day by drinking water at whatever point you feel parched to decrease your hangover symptoms.
4. Skip The Greasy Meals And Opt For Fast-Digesting Carbs
Conventional wisdom tells us eating something heavy like biscuits and gravy, bacon and sausage and burgers can help cure a hangover. In reality, high-fat meals take a long time to empty the stomach. This could be trouble for our stomach lining since it’s already irritated from the alcohol. Instead, Beaver recommends choosing fast-digesting carbs if you are nauseous. The types of carbs that are easiest to digest, include:
- Toast
- Crackers
- Bagels
5. Don’t Drink Coffee
If you’re a coffee drinker, you probably already believe in the power of your morning cup. But, when it comes to hangovers, coffee isn’t a cure at all. The caffeine in coffee may temporarily help reduce fatigue, but it will not cure hangover symptoms. There’s no scientific evidence at this time showing that caffeine has either beneficial or detrimental effects on hangover symptoms.Â
If you regularly drink coffee and you feel a caffeine headache coming on, Beaver recommends having a small cup — but don’t feel like you need to otherwise.
When Should You Seek Medical Help?
Hangovers disappear on their own after a few hours. Approach a doctor if you feel that frequent bouts of heavy drinking can lead to alcohol withdrawal. You can also consult a doctor when regular hangovers adversely affect the quality of your life like your performance at work and personal relationships. On the recommendation of your doctor, you may undergo alcohol addition sessions, in case of an extreme situation.
5 Useful Tips To Prevent A Hangover
- Eat before and while drinking to keep your stomach full and reduce space in your stomach for alcohol intake
- Choose your alcohol carefully as those with a high percentage of alcohol may cause a hangover
- Sip water between drinks to stay hydrated
- Drink slowly to prevent the chances of over-drinking
- Know when to stop
Key Takeaways
- A hangover manifests through symptoms like dizziness, dry mouth and thirst, sleepiness, and in serious cases, anxiety and depression
- Hangovers are caused when the body has gone beyond its ability to process and digest the alcohol that has been consumed
- There are various home remedies that you can follow to get relief from a hangover
- Better still, you should be aware of the preventive measures for a hangover, so that you don’t experience it at all
Now that you are aware of the causes, symptoms, home remedies, and preventive measures of a hangover, go drink responsibly!