What You Should Know About Hangovers
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Defined Tag: Other Headache Types.

Almost everyone’s experienced it -- the pain and nausea of a hangover. Too much alcohol the night before leaves you feeling sick to your stomach, achy, photophobic, and worst of all, your head feels like it’s going to split open. Even if you had a great time partying yesterday, this is the point at which you usually say you’re never going to drink again.

Why does Alcohol Give You a Headache, Anyway?

The most common side effect of drinking too much is the pounding headache. So what is it about alcohol that makes your head hurt? The answer is ethanol, the most common type of alcohol, which is responsible not only for your aching head, but also for any memory loss you might experience due to drinking.

Ethanol does a number on your blood vessels, making them expand, which is called vasodilation. This in itself causes pain in your head, but it doesn’t stop there. Ethanol also acts as a natural diuretic, which is a fancy name for any substance that makes you urinate more often. Because of this, when you’re drinking, you lose more vitamins and minerals as well as the salt your body requires. This means you can become dehydrated if you don’t drink extra water while drinking alcohol. Your body begins to dehydrate and, as a defense mechanism, sends more blood to your brain and less to your arms and skin. This again makes the blood vessels of the brain to vasodilate or get larger, which results in a headache.

Ethanol’s not the only culprit that might have been in your drink, though; some liquors may have formed chemicals called congeners during fermentation. These are a type of impurity that are encouraged in the making of certain liquors, as they give the alcohol a color and taste that may be desirable. However, they’re also responsible for your hangover headache. A good rule to remember with most drinks is that the clearer the liquid, the less trouble you’ll have the next morning. However, this doesn’t apply to moonshine or beer.  Brandy’s one of the worst offenders when it comes to congeners.

How to Avoid the Hangover Headache

First, remember that one of the biggest causes of the post-alcohol headache is dehydration. Alternate alcoholic drinks with water and you may stave off some of the potential pain the next day. Drink another glass or two before you go to bed. Take a multi-vitamin to help put back some of the nutrients that the alcohol removes from your system. When you do wake up, make sure to drink more water, and perhaps a sports drink, which is designed to help you rehydrate by giving you electrolytes, helping you to retain the minerals and salts your body needs.

The only sure way to avoid a hangover is to avoid the alcohol in the first place! However, with a little forethought and a bit of water, you can still go out drinking while avoiding the bad hangover feeling the next day.

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