ELi5: Why does drinking alcohol give you a worse hangover as you get older?
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This answer will be scientifically inaccurate, but an ELI5 nonetheless.
Hangover comes from dehydration & electrolyte imbalance. As we get older, our brains have less tolerance for imbalances (it’s easier to tip the balance, harder to regain balance).
How to avoid? Prevent the imbalance to take place. Drink water *while* drinking alcohol. You’ll get drunk with *less* hangover.
Not a scientific answer, but I’m not sure that’s really a hard rule. For example, I think real alcoholics might not even get bad hangovers and some people don’t naturally, but it probably more generally has to do with your body not being as easily able to recover and handle extreme exertions as well as you get older, just for normal aging reasons.
But hangovers are the type of thing that hits everyone differently, and other factors can really cause bad hangovers for some, but not for others. Could be that you don’t drink as often and don’t have as much of a tolerance as you might when you were younger. Or it may be not eating enough, for others not drinking enough water, for others when they drink hard alcohol, for some when the beverages have too much sugar, etc.
Or those theories may all be wrong, or they may all contribute to a hangover or lack thereof, but I think that it’s too random to really nail down a scientific reason why you get hungover or not, just that if you drink a lot and don’t follow the pro tips, it’s simply more likely to be tougher to recover as you get older.
Our body parts slow down and don’t work as efficiently as we age (preparing us for death). Specifically, your liver and metabolism won’t be as strong/fast as before in their responsibilities, such as breaking down alcohol and processing it until the next morning.
I’ve drank heavily for years and my hangovers range anywhere from not hungover at all, to completely debilitated for multiple days. It’s weird.
As we age, our body’s ability to metabolize alcohol decreases, leading to more intense hangovers.
Another eli5 answer here, your body can actually become “conditioned” to handle alcohol, the more often you drink, the better the hangovers are. I think 9/10 times when people say their hangovers are worse now that they are older, it’s because they don’t drink as regularly as they did when they were young. Simple as that.
A few things. Things like whiskey, spiced rum, and red wine give you worse hangovers than vodka, which in my experience is more what young’uns drink. Your liver becomes less effective at filtering out all the stuff in those drinks (including but not exclusively alcohol). And finally, those things which your liver become worse at dealing with cause chemical imbalances that your brain becomes less tolerant of with age.
Drink water.
I used to drunk exclusive soda and I got to a point where if I drank *any* alcohol I’d feel it the next day. Now I drink at least 3L of water a day instead (sometimes up to 8L) and now I don’t get hungover at all.
I honestly think it’s more of as you get older you do it less so you’re body isn’t as good at handling it
Depends on the person – I never had particularly bad hangovers, but at some point about 5 years ago I just stopped getting them.
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