The medical term for a hangover is veisalgia, and it's absolutely perfect—so on the nose it's hard to believe it's real. The word's roots are Norwegian and Greek; "uneasiness following debauchery" (kveis) and "pain" (algia). I mean…We've certainly all been there, buried in a debt of pain when the bill from the previous night's partying comes due—the joy and fun and bliss of the night disappearing with the morning sun, replaced with a brain-splitting, body-flattened regret that leaves you bargaining with God. Just one symptom of the common hangover—headache, sensitivity to light and sound, fatigue, nausea—could ruin your day. Combine them, and you want to die. Fortunately, (unfortunately?) you won't.
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There is no cure (save for time, which we'll get to later). Once you're in the throes of a hangover, you can only seek to understand why your body is making you pay such a brutal price. To do just that, we talked to Jerrold B. Leikin M.D., Director of Medical Toxicology at NorthShore University HealthSystem. He explained the physiology of a soul-crushing hangover to us in painstaking detail. Here's what's going on inside that temple of yours.Hangovers are basically mini alcohol withdrawals. As you drink, alcohol affects the neurotransmitters for chemicals in your brain, says Leikin. Initially, drinking makes you feel euphoric because the disruption of these neurotransmitters results in large amounts of reward chemicals, like dopamine, being released all at once. Your brain adapts to these changes, and when the alcohol is removed, the opposite reaction occurs. In essence, you go from feeling like The Shit, to just plain feeling like shit. Why?"As it's being metabolized, alcohol is oxidized into a substance called acetaldehyde, which makes you feel awful," says Leikin. "Acetaldehyde is a really toxic metabolite. It's more toxic than alcohol itself in a lot of ways. If you get too much of it, you'll feel dysphoric, you'll start to feel nauseous, your head will start to hurt, and it can exacerbate depression."If you'd kept the drinking to a minimum, your liver would have been able to get rid of the acetaldehyde before it had time to do much damage. But you didn't, so your liver's store of glutathione–a chemical that would normally attack acetaldehyde and break it down into a less harmful substance–has been severely depleted by the amount of alcohol you sucked into your poor, broken body. Hence, everything hurts.
The Basics
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Headache, Fatigue, and Sensitivity
Dehydration Station: Population, You
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Your Stomach and Asshole
A Thick Fog Blankets Your Brain
Off to the Races: Your Heart
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