What exactly is a hangover ?

Question

Since moving back to college, I've suffered many this past week. But what is it about drinking that makes you so sick the next day?

Answer 1

Found this on a hangover site,....quite interesting actually.
Alcohol lowers your inhibitions; increases your ability to do stupid stuff; decreases your ability to discriminate between attractive and ugly people; & makes driving challenging, dangerous, & illegal. Alcohol is a poison. If you drink too much too quickly, it can kill you. It breaks your body down. One of the by-products is a substance called acetaldehyde. This poison can kill you in large doses & messes with your head in smaller doses.
Other poisons are in alcoholic drinks, too. Fermented drinks contain congeners. These are responsible for some of the worst hangovers. Some alcoholic drinks have more congeners than others. Generally, dark drinks have more of them that light drinks do, and cheaper liquors have more than expensive ones.
Also, look out for red wine. Red wine not only contains alcohol poisons and congeners, but a separate poison called tyramine. Drinking cheap red wine is practically begging for a massive hangover. Here’s another trouble with alcohol: in order to metabolize the alcohol, your body burns sugar that’s stored in your body. This is one of the reasons alcohol can make you feel weak and lazy. Since your body is busy metabolizing the alcohol, it has very little energy left for doing other things. Also, since you burn all that sugar up, you don’t have any left the next morning... So you feel weak.
Alcohol is also a diuretic. That means that it makes you pee a lot. That might sound harmless, but it’s actually the cause of most of your hangover... Most of the symptoms of your hangover are actually the symptoms of dehydration. Shaking, weakness, dizziness, sensitivity to light and sound, dry mouth, and headaches are all symptoms of both dehydration and hangover. That’s why a hangover feels so much like the flu. (Dehydration during the flu is caused by diarrhea and vomiting.)
Another problem with peeing so much is that you pee out all of your electrolytes... Your bodies dissolved minerals, such as potassium... Your body needs these for normal cell function. Without them, nothing functions properly.
Between all of the poisons, the lack of sugars, the dehydration, and the electrolyte depletion... It’s no wonder at all you feel so lousy during a hangover.

Answer 2

What is a Hangover?
The formal name for a hangover is veisalgia, from the Norwegian word for "uneasiness following debauchery" (kveis) and the Greek word for "pain" (algia) -- an appropriate title considering the uncomfortable symptoms experienced by the average drinker. The common hangover includes some or all of the following:
Headache
Poor sense of overall well-being
Sensitivity to light and sound
Diarrhea
Loss of appetite
Trembling
Nausea
Fatigue
Increased heart rate and blood pressure
Dehydration(dry mouth, extreme thirst, dry eyes)
Trouble concentrating
Anxiety
Difficulty sleeping
Weakness
The most common symptoms are headache, fatigue and dehydration, and the least common is trembling. The severity and number of symptoms varies from person to person; however, it is generally true that the more alcohol a drinker consumes, the worse the hangover will be.
It usually takes five to seven cocktails over the course of four to six hours to cause a hangover for a light-to-moderate drinker (a man who drinks up to three alcoholic beverages a day or a woman who drinks up to one). It may take more alcohol for heavier drinkers because of increased tolerance. Other than the number of drinks consumed, hangovers can be made worse by:


drinking on an empty stomach
lack of sleep
increased physical activity while drinking (dancing, for example)
dehydration before drinking
poor health
The reason for some symptoms isn't fully understood, but research has led scientists to have a pretty good understanding of the primary causes of a hangover. In the next sections, we'll find out what's going on in the body to cause these problems.

Answer 3

What Exactly Is A Hangover

Answer 4

Alcohol is "poison" to your body. The liver is the organ that breaks down poisons that enter your body. If you drink a lot of alcohol this causes your liver to put in overtime. To work properly the liver needs a lot of liquids ,which it will take from your other organs, to combat the alcohol, this causes dehydration, hence the dry mouth, headache and general sickness you experience the morning after.

To have less severe hangovers and also as a favour to your liver it is advisable to drink a glass of water for every alcoholic beverage you drink. This works 2 ways, you supply your liver with plenty of liquids and the water also makes you feel "full" thus perhaps making you drink less alcohol.

Answer 5

You are dehydrated from the alcohol and going through alcohol withdrawal. Try drinking less, and make sure you drink lots of water before going to bed. This really does make a difference. And do not take aspirin for your hangover. It thins your blood, as does alcohol, and can lead to serious medical problems if you combine the two.

Answer 6

All a hangover is is dehydration as alcohol is a diuretic and pulls the fluid from your body. If you drink water through out the night as well as alcohol, or make sure you drink several glasses of water before going to bed you won't have a hangover.

Answer 7

Hangovers are multi-causal. Ethanol has a dehydrating effect (such substances are known as diuretics), which causes headaches, dry mouth, and lethargy. Dehydration causes the brain to shrink away from the skull slightly.[citation needed] This can be mitigated by drinking water after consumption of alcohol. Alcohol's impact on the stomach lining can account for nausea. Due to the increased NADH production during metabolism of ethanol by alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenases, excess NADH can build up and slow down gluconeogenesis in the liver, thus causing hypoglycemia.

Answer 8

Dehydration and pressure in the head from swollen blood vessels in the brain... Alcohol is a POISON you know!

You could get high off a little arsenic too and build a tolerance if you took small doses over a long period of time.

Ahh another dim witted college student ready to graduate and take on the world one belly shot at a time!

Answer 9

the headache is from dehydration...so before you go to bed you should drink at least a glass of water. it will minimize the headache. Throwing up is your system cannot take/digest anymore more alcohol (means you have a slight alcohol poisoning) There's no way to really minimize this reaction and you really don't want to...it's your bodies way of getting rid of the excess alcohol. It's good for you to throw up if you need. Also, try to piss as much as you can though out the night of drinking...helps with the throwing up thing in the mornings and headache.

Good Luck and have fun!!!! ;)

Answer 10

dehydration.

Drink plenty of water through out the day, BEFORE you go out drinking, and try to drink water during your evening of drinking. Before bed, I take a couple of Advil just to be on the safe side.

Alcohol purges the water from your system, so you become quickly dehydrated, which can cause nausea, irritability, dry mouth, and just feeling like crap. Also, your body does not enter REM or deep sleep (when it actually gets it rest) until it has processed all the alcohol out of your system. For an average person, it takes 1 hour per 1 ounce of alcohol to exit your system. (i.e. 1 shot or 1 beer or 1 glass of wine.)