Previously: Making sure you get enough to eat at holiday parties.
‘Tis the season for rejoicing — but beware! One too few glasses of eggnog at the office party, or a little less champagne than you’d planned on having for New Year’s Eve, and you might just find yourself waking up at your usual hour the morning after, feeling more or less like your usual self, with no excuse to stay in bed shivering and running hot and cold all morning, then throwing up blearily for most of the afternoon.
If you’ve ever asked yourself how just one round fewer could result in the complete avoidance of regret and misery, then this article is for you. You’ll never go without the next-day heart palpitations, forearm sweats, skullbone headaches, full-body stench, the sickening sense that you will never not feel dizzy for the rest of your days, or punctuated sleep patterns that make life so interesting and hard to predict ever again. Here are some tips you can use before, during, and after a holiday celebration to make sure you wake up (if you find yourself successfully entering REM sleep at all) with a proper hangover.
1. Avoid drinking too much water. Water needlessly thins the blood. You also run the risk of fatal water intoxication. If you’re tempted to order a glass of water with your next cocktail, try smoking a cigarette instead.
2. Don’t eat anything until after you’ve created a base layer of alcohol in your stomach. You don’t have any room to spare. You want to feel drunk in your fingernails, and you don’t need a lousy cheeseburger camping out in the middle of your abdomen, absorbing all of the precious alcohol that you bought with your own money. Get drunk on your own dime, cheeseburger.
3. Mix it up. Why end the night drinking the same cocktail you began it with? Variety is the spice of life. Like the rhyme says: “Beer before liquor, you’ll find love quicker. Liquor before beer, be of good cheer.”
4. Avoid cigarettes. Unless you’re using them to resist the urge to drink water; otherwise, cigars are better. Inhale deeply. Really let the smoke settle. You want to be able to feel the outline of your lungs throbbing against your rib cage when you wake up in the morning.
5. When it comes to combining alcohol and prescription medication, trial and error is the only way to go. Do mojitos and lorazepam really impair your ability to operate heavy machinery? Are you really going to let a label directed at the general public tell you what’s right for your body? Of course not. You know yourself better than any label, and there’s only one way to find out. You’re kind of like a scientist, if you think about it, which makes what you’re doing both groundbreaking and brave.
6. It’s not just water you need to watch out for: avoid clear liquids entirely. The browner, the better. Remember, you can add red wine to anything.
7. Don’t coddle yourself the next day. Tossing restlessly in bed, churning up the sheets, furiously flinging your arm over your eyes in a futile attempt at sleep makes for such a flat hungover experience. What does it feel like to drive hungover? What does it feel like to lead a three-hour meeting? What does it feel like to vote and then do like sixty squats? That’s how your hangover can really achieve texture and dimension. It’ll feel like you’re slowly dying in so many different ways.
8. Take a couple of Tylenol. Anything with acetaminophen is fine, really; it’s time to remind your liver that it works for you, not the other way around. Get your money’s worth out of it.
9. Lean in to the experience. Remind yourself of all the nights you’ve fallen asleep in front of your laptop, all the jokes you’ve made at the expense of others. Why regret one thing when you can regret everything? Let your anxiety attack blossom and unfold at its own pace. Go to your kitchen, look at the counter in disgust, then go back to bed without doing anything. Really get a sense of what your sheets smell like. This is you time.
Tags: drinking, drinking tips, hangovers, living your best life, the holidays, you know you’re not supposed to do this though right
Just reading #6 made me nauseated. The worst hangover I ever had was when I went to an open bar 50th birthday party for my parents’ best friend and decided I’d look really mature if I constantly drank doubles of rye on the rocks all night.
See, when I stick to brown spirits, I get less hangover than any other single way of drinking, especially if it’s neat. The hangover is just kind of dry, no headache or flu-ish feelings.
Literally everyone else’s mileage has varied from mine, though.
Yeah, I definitely had all of the feelings – the migraines, the throwing up, the full-body chills, etc. Through trial and error, I have determined that the alcoholic drinks I cannot drink in excess are:
-Anything with orange juice (I guess the citric acid irritates my stomach? I’ve tossed my cookies every time I drink more than one Screwdriver)
-Brown spirits, including whiskey, rye, bourbon, scotch or other delicious variations, and Malibu rum. Only Malibu rum does me in.
Wine I’m okay with, I get a little headache if I overdo it but not much else, I dislike the rubbing alcohol taste of vodka too much to drink it excessively, and gin is always my best friend. I love you, gin. We complete each other.
My spiritual twin! I’ve had virtually the same reactions to these.
Must. make. friends. with. gin.
Gin is wonderful! I know all the haters complain that it tastes like a pine tree but they don’t ALL taste like pine trees! I feel like Sapphire tastes more flower-y and Tanqueray is piney-er but Beefeater isn’t that strong. I dunno, I just really like herbal or strong tastes but never realized I did, and it took me so long to try gin after years of waffling over what type of booze I like that when I discovered it it was like hoardes of drunken angels sang.
Anything herbal works for me. Like Jagermeister.
Everyone in the throes of drunkenness or its aftermath should come over to my house, I’m making homemade poutine for lunch. It can absorb any alcohol created by man.
Hail Nicole Cliffe, Patron Saint of Lifegiving sodium and grease!
I was in Toronto this summer buying poutine at midnight or so, like you do, and one of the framed pieces of favorable press this establishment had on their wall has the headline “drunkards have particular affinity for iconic dish” I took a photo of it. The photo is somewhat blurry.
Poutine?! I’ll be there in five.
Poutine?! I’ll be there in five
Gah, wish I were in Utah w/ y’all.
Forget cigars, hours of smoking grape flavoured shisha from a hookah will also do the trick! It will also ensure that you won’t be able to stomach scented candles or fragrant teas for months afterwards!
The Toast, how did you know that I decided to get SO DRUNK for no reason last night and am experiencing this all right now? It’s not a holiday in Canada, I am at work 🙁
oh man I am dying. Why did I think it was such a good idea to drink beer AND wine AND mescal AND hypnotiq? What is wrong with me?
No Qream?
they don’t sell it in Canada, or I would have drunk that too
I realize that I am all over this hangover thread but GUYS I have to win a chili cook off in an hour.
A little late to the game here but I have to know: HOW’D THE COOK OFF GO?
Hpnotiq? DID YOU LOSE A BET?
I briefly confused myself with nick cannon or something
The drunkest I’ve ever been was a New Years Eve where I exclusively drank Hypnotiq and champagne cocktails. I woke up the next morning to an apartment flooding because a pipe had burst because the window was left open in -30 weather and I was so hungover that I laid naked and moaning in the bed while the superintendent tried to fix it and the almost-stranger with whom I went home laughed and laughed. My dress was completely ripped up the back, too…like it had become just a rectangular piece of fabric, not a tube. Never again.
New Years = THE WORST, because it’s the one holiday where we can be easily tricked into drinking “festive” sparkling wine MIXED with something else SWEET. ugh ugh ugh. I think my best/worst was champagne + Grand Marnier. I was so, so dead to the world the next day, but at least I was among friends. It was far from my worst New Years though.
Well, that is super epic.
How did you find hypnotiq? Do you know of a time warp to 2003? That was my Sophisticated drink in college, i mean, there were rap songs about it
Another essential part to getting a really solid hangover is being over 30. It used to be hard work to get hungover, but it got a lot easier after then.
My most spectacular hangovers have been with clear liquor. I think that’s because it’s easier to drink enough of, nice and quick. Brown liquor tempts you to dawdle and savour.
For a long time, I thought gin was incapable of hangovering me (hanging me over? throwing me overboard?), but then one night I ran out of mix and started swigging it straight from the bottle (oh, yeah; I am ONE CLASSY DAME). The next morning I awoke to the sound of my liver packing its suitcases and screaming that we were through. I spent the rest of the day saying my final goodbyes to my partner and thanking him for all the good years we’d had together.
“Get drunk on your own dime, CHEESEBURGER.”
Thank christ I am no longer trying to keep up with hackers twice my size and also of a different, more alcohol-absorptive physical composition.
I see you were at my sister’s house last night… Also, I am rocking this hangover with GRACE AND POISE at work today.
By which I mean that I keep walking into walls on my way to the coffee machine and bathroom.
Bring your hangover A-game and spend the evening in a hot tub! It keeps you warm so you can be a drunk on the go (to the liquor cabinet and back, oh hell, just bring the bottle in). Remember, it’s always more fun to drink spumante or dolce sparkling wine, because sweets for the sweet, right? When you wake up in the morning (or at 5am) wishing for death, you want that wish to emanate from every dehydrated and sugar-beaten pore in your body. The only way to achieve that is sweet wine in a hot tub for a minimum of two hours. If the 70s can survive champagne in hot tubs, you certainly can survive Cook’s in a hot tub.
when I was young and actually much smarter than I am now I once spent an entire night in a hot tub, with drinks pre-arranged in arms reach.
how is this smart, you ask?
the drinks were all gatorade.
It was brilliant, and a wonderful night, and I will never ever do it again.
oh god I have done this (new year’s eve, for fuck’s sake WHY) and will personally vouch for its awfulness.
My weirdest most embarrassing drunk moment was when my friend’s parents found me asleep on their bathroom floor after a very pleasant night of drinking sweet wine in their hot tub.
I did not think I drank THAT MUCH wine. I did not feel *outlandishly* drunk when I went to bed. And yet somehow the heat + syrupy booze compelled me to sleepwalk/blackout-walk to the bathroom, think better of heading back to bed, and just cuddle up on the linoleum next to their cat’s smelly litterbox. 🙁 They saw my hair poking out from under the door and thought I was dead in there.
To get going really well you should get drunk in a sauna. Never drink water, only more alcohol. Never have I ever been that dehydrated.
This isn’t a way to murder someone discreetly?
Oh god I moved to New Orleans last year and since then I’ve discovered new lows of hangoverdom. Like incapable of drinking water (much less anything more challenging) for a full 24 hours hungover. Tip for any visitors to my lovely city: if a drink is over 20 ounces, has some novelty name like “Monsoon”, and doesn’t taste like alcohol, you do not, I repeat do not, need “one for the road”. That first one will take care of you juuuuust fine, trust me.
ermahgerd I just moved to NOLA! ….and I got drunk last night, whaddaya know.
When you wake up at 7am feeling totally fine, this is the time to seize the day. Go for a run and enjoy the slow realization that you’re still drunk. Savour the slippery agony of the hangover setting in, piece by piece, as the day continues. Take a brief nap on a park bench and then stumble back to your apartment. You’ve earned this.
Dylan Moran on the late-onset hangovers of increased age is a relevant classic here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Rh-eq6YOM “It’s a beautiful day! The birds are swaying, the trees are singing!”
If you want to really taste a hangover fully, so that it’s just oozing out of your pores, make sure you take NJ Transit to Newark the next morning, then take a flight to the Midwest on a small, especially rattly airplane. You’ll be *marinating* in hangover. Mmmmm….
I once got a train from Portland back to Seattle and immediately passed the fuck out, having just experienced a 3 day bender with my best friend. I woke up about an hour later after my little nap, and was bleary eyed looking around when the nice lady next to me said “so… drank some whiskey last night?”. I felt so badly, I must have reeked from every pore since we had polished of a bottle of Bushmills between the two of us the previous night. Fortunately this story ends in me buying her drinks in the bar car since she was hung over too and we just got re-drunk. I made a drunk train friend! This was 3 years ago and I still occasionally talk to her 🙂
Definitely don’t drink so much that you wake up still drunk. Because then it’s so easy to sneak past the hangover by drinking lightly during the day so sobriety comes on very slowly.
I will triple-fist drinks when this happens. Water, coffee, gin and tonic.
Poutine?! I'll be there in five
For whatever reason the worst hangover I’ve had in recent memory involved 4-6 La Chouffes (strong Belgian beer- I thought they were 6% but turns out they’re more like 8) without dinner at an after-work drinks celebrating the launch of our website. Somehow we all thought it was a good idea to keep having them. We all got excruciatingly drunk and had various stories to tell as we trickled in over the next week- absolutely none of us were able to work the next day, fortunately we can ‘work at home’ – about throwing up in trains or falling off our bikes or not being able to figure out how to work the debit-card machine at the grocery store. But seriously, the next day I thought I really was going to die.
“Get drunk on your own dime, CHEESEBURGER.”
Thank christ I am no longer trying to keep up with hackers twice my size and also of a different, more alcohol-absorptive physical composition.