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Saturday, January 30, 2016

Pinky's Hangover Hacks



If I’d known, thirty years ago, what I know now I’d have saved myself many head-pounding mornings staring at the bottom of a plastic bucket and hopefully this post might help you to wake up as fresh as a designated driver after a night where you’ve behaved more like a professional footballer at a long weekend barbecue.




1. Take an aspirin with half a glass of milk before you even start drinking. The aspirin puts a clamp on inflammation surrounding the grey, squidgy matter in your head and the milk puts a lining on your stomach. I accidentally discovered this trick one night when I took an aspirin for a mild toothache before I went out on the town. The tactic has never failed me since. It works for toothaches too.



2. I know it’s a pain in the neck, but drink as much water as you can. I drink room temperature water because you can chug it down really quickly and that way you can get to your next drink without too much delay.



3. You can mix white wine with red wine and follow it up with tequila, white rum, black rum or whiskey. It’s all alcohol and mixing drinks never made any difference to my pain levels the next day. It’s really the amount consumed that’s the killer. If I eat food before the second drink, it slows down the guzzling a bit. 

Mind you, eating is cheating and it does kill the buzz.



4. If you’re like me, once you get the taste of the uninhibited silliness which accompanies the state of tipsiness, your brain tells you that to maintain this alcoholic euphoria you have to keep drinking.

It doesn’t really work that way because after the third or fourth drink, everything starts to go downhill. You lose the ability to say, She sells seashells by the seashore, and it comes out as, Shhhee thells shesells by the… oh just pith off and get me another wine.

You also feel as though you’re walking on a boat in a not-so-sheltered harbour. You repeat yourself when telling stories about your sex life which you really shouldn’t be sharing and you might start putting your arms around other people’s shoulders pretending you like them but really you’re just trying to maintain balance.



Now is the time to distract yourself from mindless chugging. Get up and dance if you can, go for a walk to the loo and strike up an interesting conversation. In other words, delay your next drink for as long as you can.



5. When you get home after a big night, these are the things you MUST do.

Clean your teeth, otherwise when you wake up in the morning it will feel as though someone has superglued your tongue to your hard palate.


Wash off heavy makeup so your eyes don’t stick together overnight and then when you wake up in the morning you panic and think you’ve gone blind, your eyeballs were pecked out by a vulture during the night or you’re dead and in hell.


Close your curtains/blinds so the sun doesn’t stream in at the crack of dawn exacerbating your headache, waking you prematurely and allowing all those cringe-worthy memories to creep in to your mind making you grab for your phone to check if you really did stand on the bar and perform a striptease to the band playing, ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’


Put a huge glass of water on your bedside table. Drink it. Refill it. You don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and wind up hurtling down the stairs in darkness on your way to the kitchen.


Turn your phone on to silent to prevent idiots disturbing your delicate recovery.


Don’t look at the time on your clock. The less you know the better.



6. If you do wake up feeling seedy, force down a glass of orange juice, eat some toast and sip on weak coffee. Go for a freezing cold shower making sure the icy water is concentrated on your head to reduce rampant swelling of the brain. (Some people say that swimming in the ocean cures a hangover. If you’re capable of driving to the ocean then you don’t really have a proper hangover in my books.)



7. Your liver will be screaming out for greasy food but it’s merely a cry for help from the withered organ. It’s desperately attempting to process the alcohol and thinks it needs fat to help it do its job. In reality, eating a burger and deep fried chips just means the little sucker will have to work harder. A large glass of cold chocolate milk usually satisfies my liver. Yours might be a tad more demanding.



8. This is an irresponsible, final piece of advice that medical authorities would probably get cranky about but it’s my desperation measure. 

I find that fifty percent of a hangover is the result of a lack of sleep. I get jittery and prone to panic attacks when suffering a really disgraceful hangover and I can’t relax enough to take a nap. Sometimes I take a Mersyndol or two to render me unconscious for a few hours. I always wake up feeling relatively normal again. 

The paracetamol most likely strains the liver but it gets rid of headaches and the codeine/ doxylamine succinate cocktail knocks me out cold. 

It’s why Mersyndol has the word, Mercy, in its name.


Remember, the horror of most hangovers only lasts until five o’clock in the afternoon, a bit like a day at work. The agony will soon be over and just like the pain of giving birth, you’ll forget all about it.