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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   2752 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 7, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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What are your best tips for avoiding / preventing hangovers?

My theory is that the hangover is due to alcohol’s effect on dopamine and serotonin, not its effect on the body. Its effect on the liver is negligible for one time use. Small-scale liver damage does not usually result in hangover-like feelings, otherwise people would get hangovers from eating fried food or tons of sugar.

So if it’s serotonin and dopamine getting all excited, there’s not much you can do except cognitive rest while your brain re-ups and re-sensitizes and stuff. Replace my words with desired scientific jargon.

You can produce serotonin in the brain by having 20g-50g of pure carbohydrate (98+), without fat or protein within four hour window, if you are non-diabetic. This would be fruit, sugar, or honey and not much else. Higher carb diet is associated with healthier dopamine than higher protein diet, and so is intermittent fasting (I think). And exercise is good for dopamine system.

But yeah I doubt there’s any real short-term cure. The high of alcohol will necessarily lead to a low.

My knee jerk reaction is to agree, but dopamine actually seems spiked to me day after. I’m sober for a while now, but I remember the morning after drinking being very horny. Seems a lot of people get that, although some people say it is low dopamine causing you to crave anything that releases it. However, that tends to feel more like anhedonia than horny in my experience

Drink 10x more in water or Gatorade than what you had in alcohol. You'll pee alot before going to bed and may wake up middle of night but my mornings always feel better for hangovers.

I know it's a tedious comment to make, but the only thing that worked for me was stopping drinking.

There are plenty of good ways to minimize hangovers if you drink in moderation, but in my experience every one of them fails in the face of sufficient whiskey. If you're drinking plenty of water, getting plenty of sleep, taking painkillers, and you still have hangovers... you might want to consider the root cause.

Eat a good meal before you start drinking. Avoid hard liquor, and especially avoid shots. Stick to beer, wine, hard seltzers, stuff like that. A practical way of saying: get less drunk. Stopping drinking earlier in the night before you sleep will also help.

As far as a hangover cure: a little extreme, but the only reliable hangover cure that actually works 100% of the time for me is Adderall. Or something similar like Vyvanse. I don't take these regularly, so I don't have a tolerance. 5mg is plenty.

Don't overdo sugar and alcohol in the same night, stick to one or the other.

Drink electrolytes before, during, after.

Get pregnant and stop drinking.

Liquid IV + 100% tequila pretty much does it for me. Water wasn’t enough.

Best cure I've found is not going to bed or at least staying up until I feel kind of sober.

Hah, you drink enough and you don’t get a choice on that. Does work if under a certain amount of alcohol though

In addition to the hydration methods mentioned by the other folks, nothing works better for me than just good old fashion extra sleep. I don't know if that qualifies as "prevention", but just planning to have an additional hour or two available to sleep in makes me impervious to aftereffects from all but the most aggressive evenings.

Whatever residual fatigue I have also seems to shake out well with a run, but that's also my advice for pretty much everything, so take it with a grain of salt.

Drink a cup of water after every drink. Gatorade or similar before drinking or before bed.

And weird thing I don't know if anyone else has experienced but if I stay up late, long enough that I start feeling sober (or at least not drunk) I will generally feel better than if I go to sleep (even if it's earlier) while still drunk. I've tested this with the same quantity and type of drinks in both scenarios.

I get a big 40oz stainless steel water bottle (I have a ton of them out of the lost and found when I ran a gym...), before I leave I fill it with ice, water, and LiquidIV (Gatorade probably works just as well) and put it by my bed (guess this won't work if you don't know where you'll sleep). I get home and drink half of it, then fill it back up with fresh water and drink it throughout the night.

So far have gotten zero hangovers after bachelor parties and polish weddings with this technique.

What happens if you do this with just ice water alone?

Probably still good. I just have a real attachment to half strength sports drinks as a panacea from scouts, and I like LiquidIV better than Gatorade these days. I do think that the electrolytes or whatever the fuck are probably a positive (they're what plants crave!) and the taste at half strength makes it easier to chug for me.

normal water works too, just not as well in my experience.

A glass of water for every drink, and then a few more at the end before you go to bed. As much time as possible (ideally at least an hour) between stopping drinking and going to bed. Isotonic drink first thing when you wake up and then try and sleep off the worst of it.

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