Hangover Tips
"Wine is bottled poetry." Robert Louis Stevenson
If you've been studying a little too long under the lamp of cheap red wine, you're going to need hangover help. Unless you never pick up a drink in your life hangovers are going to be a part of your life. How small or how large a part depends mostly on your alcohol consumption -- if you can avoid getting good and drunk when you imbibe you may never have to follow any of these hangover tips. Having spent some time both behind and in front of bars, I can guarantee that most of the people reading this don't know how to drink without getting in their cups.
What's a guy to do when get is in the grip of a nasty hangover? To find hangover relief in the future, keep these hangover tips around the next time you start the bar crawl.
Fight Dehydration
Most of us find out about the old "alcohol causes dehydration" thing our first few weekends in college. Sure, most people snuck drinks in high school or had a beer here and there with their folks as they got older, but truly massive supplies of alcohol are more commonly stumbled upon around the age of 18 or 19. There's plenty of hangover tips on college campuses -- I was once told that if I went ahead and got sick the night before I wouldn't have a hangover in the morning. This, by the way, isn't true. In fact, forcing yourself to vomit could amp up the speed of your number one hangover enemy, dehydration.
Instead of following the advice of whoever tapped the keg that nearly killed you, start practicing "safe drinking" with your first drink. Don't tip a cup back without a bottle of Evian in one hand and several more chilling in the fridge. Don't have any water at home? You may need it in the morning. Seriously, before your next ethanol adventure, stock up on giant bottles of water like its December 1999 and Y2K is at your heels.
Why does alcohol cause dehydration? In short, alcohol is the perfect toxin for sapping you of your precious bodily fluids. Alcohol causes excess urine production in the kidneys, which means you're peeing more than your store of water. Alcohol also gets in the way of protein synthesis and saps your store of vitamins and minerals. A lack of Potassium, which is a major target of the alcohol attack, causes further dehydration and pain -- that incredible thirst you feel after a long night with John Barleycorn? It isn't just because you didn't drink enough water, it is also because you don't have any Potassium.
Shock Symptoms?
Some people believe that the effects of a hangover are caused by an even more obvious enemy -- shock. These people believe that a hangover is the "morning after" effects of your overdose on what is essentially a depressant drug, alcohol. To these people, the nervous system seems to be operating under Newton's natural laws, and the hangover is the opposite reaction of sending yourself into a hypersensitive (depressed) state. Sounds deep, right? There might be some truth to it.
Hangover help for the symptoms of shock is pretty basic. If you've ever seen any hospital dramas or daytime television, you know what the ambulance does for people in shock, right? They put a blanket over them and try to make them as calm and still as possible. Sound familiar to you? If you've ever nursed one of your friends back to normalcy after a hangover, you know that this treatment is right up the drunkard's alley. The next time you get hungover, try this out. Darken the room you're in as much as possible. Pile blankets on top of yourself. Play a little bit of music or a movie at low volume. If you stay still in this position, the likelihood that you'll "sleep it off" is really high.
Unfortunately, this kind of "shock treatment" won't work for everyone, and you'll still have to replace the vitamins and liquids you lost, so the "be as still as possible" trick may only be a temporary fix.
"You've gotta eat SOMEthing"
I can't tell you the number of times I've heard this sentence. When you're hungover you don't want to eat anything. You just spent a few hours vomiting, why would you want to put food in your body?
Hate to break it to you, but your annoying girlfriend is right. You DO have to eat something. The key to hangover help is to get you to eat the right thing.
While there are more than a few "miracle cures" out there for hangovers, I'm gonna share my secret weapon, my hangover silver bullet. Bananas work for a lot of people, but the texture of a banana can sometimes make me more sick than I was before. No, I stick with good old tomatoes.
My use of tomatoes as a cure-all for hangovers started a decade ago after reading a selection of poetry by Charles Bukowski. This hard-drinking hard-living poet suggests "half a can of beer and half a can of tomato juice" as the ultimate hangover cure. While this particular cocktail is not recommended (more alcohol during a hangover is a slippery slope to AA meetings) I do believe the tomato juice suggestion was divinely inspired. Something about tomatoes seems to rush the pain of a hangover away. Try something mild like a canned juice (spicy V8 can be a god send) or even a mild Italian dish like spaghetti and red sauce.
Hopefully you'll never have another hangover. Tips like the above are a dime a dozen in bars -- I can't guarantee that downing a gallon of water the night before will save you from hangover hell in the morning. If there were a simple hangover cure don't you think every bar and gas station would be selling it by the bucket? The fact is that that true hangover help comes in the form of sage advice from a guy who has been there before.
Remember -- water, rest, bananas or tomatoes, and as little stimulation as you can manage. Want to get out from under this hangover? Help yourself -- and pass on what you've learned.