The Demon Hangover

To answer the question from Lydia O

"Loving the blog! Learnt a lot and want to keep learning please... friends say to me that their hangover is worse because they mixed their wines, as opposed to sticking to the same wine all night...is there any truth to this? Thank you Wine Wizard, xx"

I'm fairly sure, everyone reading this blog will at some point, woken up to a wave of nausea, dizziness, trembling and the sensation the devil is pounding a pneumatic drill from behind your eyeballs.

So let me explain...

Happy hangover spring chicken! The memories start flooding back... well some of them.
You see, when you drink - or more rather get drunk, your brain has to deal with simple tasks that you've just made a million times harder than normal; talking, standing up, walking and not falling over and insulting the host take priority over the less important task of remembering what happened for later.

Extreme thirst! If I overdo it... rarely of course :/ I can have dreams of drinking from fresh mountain springs or that someone is making me iced tea in the kitchen, whereas actually I'm flat out and very hung-over, it’s no secret alcohol makes you dehydrated, but dehydration seems to be something people underestimate. That feeling that your brain has anchored up and is swishing around your head is understandable - when you dehydrate yourself the soaking wet sponge that is your poor brain actually does shrink, pulling on the membranes connecting it to your skull leaving you with a horrendous headache.


When you put alcohol in your body, it turns off the part of your brain that tells your kidneys to soak up water, so you pee more without actually getting water from it. In fact if you drink a glass of 250ml wine, you can expect to pee up to 4x that amount! Hence the really long queue for the bathroom in pubs and clubs.

The people getting worse hangovers because of "mixing their wines" can blame some evil little things called congeners. These are little toxins that live in every alcoholic drink as a by-product of its production. In darker drinks such as red wine, bourbon, brandies and dark tequila there are higher levels and lots of different forms of these congeners... so be it wine, beer, spirits or bubbly, mixing is bad.

This image mirrors the effect of what alcohol can do to the control of your body down to the alignment of your eyes. Horrible innit? Yes, she is judging you.


Imagine your poor liver on a treadmill, he's happily doing a stead 6mph jog dealing with alcohol and a few congeners when you have that small white wine... then you decide to move to red wine after another glass of white, then you decide to have a beer, then another wine and then you reach the point when the absolute BEST idea in the world is to order a round of shots. You've just made your liver go from 6mph to 20mph to 100mph without giving him a break! That’s pretty mean.

But he's going to make you pay for it. Combining all these various levels of alcohol and various impurities you've given your body left it with a big backlog of horrible things to eradicate in a very short period of time. I shouldn’t have to explain how your stomach deals with this backlog to those of you who have ridden the vomit comet after a night on the sauce.

We have a lovely substance our body uses as a natural stimulant, it helps us feel perky and helps lower us into a deep lovely sleep when we haven’t hammered it with booze. It’s called Glutamine, and it is inhibited by alcohol, meaning we don’t get a good enough night’s sleep and our body tries to overcome it by giving us a glutamine rebound - we need it, but while its happening its responsible for tremors, anxiety, restlessness and high blood pressure.

Apart from a few odd theories scientists have come up with, such as sleeping it off in an oxygen tent, there’s a few steps apart from not drinking on an empty stomach, drinking a LOT of water, before, during and after drinking alcohol to help prevent the demon hangover.

Pop a couple aspirin with a big glass of water before bed, and one as you wake up - this can calm down the effects quite a lot.

Try to limit smoking while you drink, you add to the mountain of toxins your body has to shift, so if you are a slave to the nicotine, try and hold back a little.

If you feel too bad to eat in the morning, sleep. Sleep is the best medicine for your body, so do it.

But if it’s the morning after, and you can face it, do this;

Eggs for breakfast! cysteine is a compound found in eggs that helps your body sweep up the toxins left over by booze (sheep also need cysteine to make wool - my random fact of the day!)

A glass, or preferably a few of orange juice, drinking uses up a lot of your bodies vitamin C needed to help detoxify you.

Grab a sports drink, or make up a dioralyte drink, this will help replace your lost sugars, salts and electrolytes.

And remember, alcohol messes up your brains ability to rationalize, balance, make clear decisions, keep your balance, or look half decent. So when you think your hair is immaculate, your lipstick is perfectly aligned and you are walking seductively toward your date, you actually look like Aileen Wuornos.

If you are currently suffering take my advice and follow my steps, but in the meantime this adorable kitten video should make you feel better. Now go back to sleep.