It’s going to happen, probably more than once or twice in your life. You’ll be out with your buddies, on the town, cruising the bars, knocking back beers and shots of tequila and whiskey. Or perhaps someone will challenge your drinking prowess, and you defend your honor with a booze-guzzling contest. Whatever the reasons may be, you’ve overdone it, and you wake up in the morning with a raging hangover.

All you want to do is sleep, but that THUMP THUMP THUMP in your head won’t stop, plus your nausea won’t go away. You’ve abused your liver something fierce, and now that little organ is taking you to task for what you’ve done to it. Don’t worry, there’s help available. Here are some cures for a wicked hangover, or at least steps you can take to reduce the symptoms.

Alcohol dehydrates

Rehydrate your body. Drink a lot of water before you go to sleep. Yeah, you’ll have to get up and pee a few times. Deal with it. Drink tons of water the next morning as well. Your body will thank you for it.

Take a nap

If you wake up, wander around the kitchen, and still have a heavy desire to sleep, do so if you can. When you’re drunk, you sleep poorly. For those of you who don’t have to rush off to work after a night of boozing, sleeping off a hangover is sound advice.

Suck down a few sports drinks

Drink sports drinks, like water. These will help rehydrate you, but they will also give you electrolytes and other vital minerals you depleted while you were paining the town red.

Take pain relievers

Pain relievers like aspirin, Tylenol and acetaminophen can do wonders for your pounding headache, but they’re a bit of a mixed bag as far as your overall recovery is concerned. Pain relievers can agitate your liver, which is already in poor shape from all your drinking, as well as your stomach. Use them in moderation.

Don’t drink coffee

When you have a hangover, drinking coffee will dehydrate you even further. If you’re a coffee addict, and get headaches without your morning cup o’ joe, you’ll have to decide if the caffeine withdrawal symptoms are worse, or the hangover symptoms.

Take Vitamins

Multivitamin pills, B-6 and B-12 vitamins, juices with lots of vitamins, including vitamin C, can help replenish what the alcohol robbed from your body the night before, and thus ease hangover symptoms.

There are many folk remedies out there as well, like hair of the dog (a nip of alcohol when you have a hangover), greasy food, bacon and eggs, a special kind of soup and so on. While a lot of these might not have a scientific basis as effective hangover remedies, if you’ve found them helpful in the past, well, who are we to tell you otherwise? Listen to what your body is saying to you, stay hydrated, and get better soon.

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