BrainStuff Classics: What Happens When I Have A Hangover?

maybe your friends. Headaches, malaise, loss of appetite, fatigue, nausea, dehydration, and more. If you are or were a drinker, then at some point in your life, the odds are that you have had a hangover. More than seventy of alcohol consumers have had a hangover at least once, and fift have had one about once a month. Of college students feel the symptoms weekly. Hangover is like the street name

for the more formal term vasal gia. It derives from cavice, a Norwegian word that means uneasiness after drinking, and algaea, the Greek word for pain. But what happens during a hangover? How does alcohol make you feel so bad the next morning? While scientists still aren't certain about all the causes. They have a pretty good idea, So let's talk about what happens when you're consuming alcohol. It enters your blood stream and causes the pituitary gland in the brain to block

the creation of vasopressin. Vasa presson is an anti diuretic hormone, and without it, your kidneys send water directly to your bladder instead of reabsorbing it into the body. This is why when you're drinking, you need to peace so much. Drinking about two hundred and fifty millileaters of alcohol makes your body expel about eight hundred to one thousand million liters of water, one to four times as much liquid lost as gained. This helps create that hangover, which leads

us to dehydration. After a period of heavy drinking. Your body desperately wants water and sends you all the signals it can to indicate this, a dry mouth, even a headache. Headaches are frightening stuff. In this scenario, that headache is the result of water thieves inside your body. See, when you're hydrated, the other organs in your body try to compensate by stealing water from your brain. This makes your

brain shrink. Yeah, it physically shrinks. It pulls on the membranes connecting your skull to your brain, and boom, massive pulsing pain. Quote. Breaking the seal and urinating frequently can also expel potassium, magnesium, and salts needed for nerve and muscle function. Without them, you can get fatigue and nausea. Lack of glycogen can also contribute to weakness and lack

of coordination. However, a study found no correlation between this and hangovers, so the hypothesis is contradicted by the data, at least in one case. There are a few other factors at play here, such as a settled to hide and glutamine rebound which sounds like a band but it's not. When your liver breaks down an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase, it creates something called a settled to hide. This is

a nasty customer, and it's more toxic than the alcohol itself. Luckily, the liver uses another enzyme called a settled to hide de hydrogenase and a substance called glutathione to change this stuff into non toxic acetate in a short amount of time. If you've only had a few drinks, that is. When you drink more booze, your liver runs out of glutath ione, and that toxic a settled to hide can cause some

serious headaches and vomiting. Studies actually show the women have less glutathione and acetyla hyde dehydrogenase, making their hangovers potentially worse. You know how if someone sleeps while they drank too much, they won't sleep as soundly as normal. That's because of glutamine rebound. Alcohol suppresses glutamine, one of the body's natural stimulants. When the party is over and you stop imbibing, your body tries to compensate by making glutamine more than normal.

This stimulates the sleeping drinker's brain, keeping him or her from the deepest levels of slumber. This also contributes to fatigue and possibly to tremors, anxiety, restlessness, and increased blood pressure. And there's your stomach lining. Alcohol gets absorbed directly through the stomach and that irritates your stomach cells. Alcohol also promotes hydrochloric acid, like don king promotes boxers. Eventually, your nerves have had enough and they tell your brain, hey,

get this booze out of here. Boom, you vomit. It's true that vomiting can lessen some hangover symptoms, but it's by no means a good life decision. Finally, hangover sufferers have been found to have high levels of cytokinds, which your immune system normally uses to trigger fever or inflammation to battle and infection. It seems that too much alcohol can trigger cytokine release, causing symptoms like muscle ache, nausea, fatigue, memory loss, and more. And you've probably heard that some

drinks can cause worse hangovers, and this is true. It all goes back to the byproducts of fermentation known as congeners. Congeners are essentially various impurities and a given type of alcoholic beverage, they combine to create some severe hangover symptoms. Red wine and dark liquors think like bourbon, brandy, tequila, and so on, have the highest amounts of these toxins, while white wine and clear liquors have a smaller amount.

Thirty three of people who drank an amount of bourbon relative to their body weight reported severe hangovers, while only three percent of vodka drinkers experience symptoms. So that's how I hangover works. What actually happens when booze meets the body. The severity of hangovers doesn't just depend on the booze, though. Studies show that your genes, your gender, your body weight, and more can all play a role in whether you wake up with a pounding headache or just hit the

snooze button a few times. There are ways to manage a hangover, and it's one of those things it's easier to prevent than to remedy. First, you can drink in moderation or you know, you could abstain entirely. Second, if you do decide to drink, stay hydrated and eat something. Today's episode was written by Ben Bollin and produced by Tyler clang. Brian Stuff is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other Hair of the Dog topics, visit our home planet,

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