How to Avoid a Rough Morning After

We're not here to tell you not to drink. We're here to help you drink smarter.

Whether it's a night out with mates, a work do, or a weekend party, the hangover is that annoying tax on a good time. The headache, the nausea, the brain fog — they're all real, and they all eat into your next day.

Here's the honest version: there is no trick, pill or sachet with good evidence that it stops a hangover happening. What there is, is a short list of things that reliably change how much alcohol reaches your brain and how well you sleep — and those are the things that decide how your morning goes. Most of them cost nothing. This guide walks through them in order: before, during, before bed, and the morning after. No shame, no sanctimony. Because tomorrow, you've got stuff to do.

What actually causes a rough morning (and what doesn't)

It's worth getting this straight first, because a lot of folk advice is aimed at the wrong target.

When researchers in Utrecht reviewed the studies that measured blood and urine the morning after, the markers people assume matter — dehydration hormones, blood sugar, electrolytes — did not track with how bad people felt. What did track was the immune response, and in some studies the amount of acetaldehyde still in the blood (Penning et al., 2010). A later review from the same group concluded that the single clearest predictor is simply how much alcohol is in your system and how quickly your body clears it: slower clearance, worse morning (Mackus et al., 2020).

So the two levers that actually move the needle are how much alcohol gets into your blood, and how fast, and how well you sleep. Everything below is in service of one of those two. Dehydration is real and worth dealing with — it just isn't the main event.

Before You Go Out: Set Yourself Up to Win

Eat a proper meal before drinking

This is the single most useful thing on the list. Alcohol is absorbed much faster on an empty stomach, and a meal beforehand lowers the peak you reach from the same drinks. Food does a second job too: in a controlled study at Indiana University, where alcohol was given intravenously so absorption couldn't muddy the result, eating a meal an hour beforehand raised the rate at which the body cleared alcohol by around 25–45% compared with fasting — and it made no difference whether the meal was high in fat, protein or carbohydrate (Ramchandani et al., 2001).

So don't overthink the menu. A real meal, not a snack. Think:

• Grilled chicken with sweet potato and broccoli
• Salmon with brown rice and veg
• A proper sandwich on wholemeal bread
• Pasta with olive oil, lean meat, and tomato sauce

Skip: going out hungry, and the "line your stomach with milk or butter" ritual — a glass of milk is not a meal, and there's no evidence it does anything a sandwich wouldn't do better.

Have a glass of water before you leave

Nothing dramatic here. Alcohol does make you pass more urine — a Loughborough study found that a litre of 4% beer produced about 160 ml more urine over four hours than the same beer without alcohol in people who were already well hydrated (Hobson & Maughan, 2010). That's a modest effect, not a catastrophe, but starting the night topped up rather than thirsty is free and sensible. A glass or two of water with your meal is plenty; you don't need to force down a litre.

What about taking something before you go out?

You'll see supplements marketed to take "before drinking". We make a recovery sachet ourselves, so we have every commercial reason to tell you to take one before you leave the house. We're not going to, because the evidence isn't there. A 2022 systematic review from King's College London found 21 placebo-controlled trials of pills, extracts and juices for hangover, rated every one of them very low quality, and concluded there is no intervention with good enough evidence to recommend for preventing a hangover (Roberts et al., 2022). The things in this article that work are the meal, the pacing, the water and the sleep. Where a sachet does earn its place is the morning after, and we'll get to that.

While You're Out: The Real-Time Moves That Count

Pace yourself: roughly one unit an hour

The NHS puts it plainly: one unit is 10 ml of pure alcohol, which is around the amount the average adult can process in an hour (NHS). A pint of 5% lager is about 2.8 units; a large (250 ml) glass of 13% wine is about 3.3. Energy drinks, coffee and cold showers don't change that rate.

What pacing does is keep the amount of alcohol in your blood lower at any given moment — and that number, remember, is the best predictor of tomorrow. Five drinks in an hour and five drinks across a whole evening are the same units but very different mornings.

The one-for-one rule: a soft drink between drinks

Simple and deceptively powerful: for every alcoholic drink, have a water, a soft drink or an alcohol-free alternative. The real reason it works isn't the hydration — it's that you physically can't drink as fast when you're alternating, so your peak stays lower. The fluid is a bonus.

Pro tip: alternate with something you actually like — sparkling water with lime, ginger ale, an alcohol-free beer — not just tap water. You're far more likely to stick with it.

Choose your drinks wisely: congeners

Not all drinks hit the same way. Congeners are compounds produced during fermentation and ageing, and darker drinks tend to carry more of them. In a Brown University study, 95 heavy drinkers were brought to the same breath-alcohol level on bourbon one night and vodka another; next-day performance was equally impaired on both, but people felt worse after the bourbon (Rohsenow et al., 2010). Dark spirits — whisky, brandy, dark rum — sit at the high end; vodka, gin and white rum at the low end. Red wine is generally thought to carry more congeners than white, though that pairing hasn't been tested head-to-head the way bourbon and vodka have.

This doesn't mean avoid whisky or red wine (we're not here to kill your fun). But if it's a big night and you have a choice, a gin and tonic will probably treat you more kindly in the morning than a whisky neat. The amount still matters far more than the colour.

Mind the mixers — but not for the reason you've heard

The internet says sugary mixers "speed up alcohol absorption". The research says the opposite. Two trials at Northern Kentucky University gave people the same vodka with either a regular sugar-sweetened soft drink or its diet version; breath alcohol was significantly higher with the diet mixer — in one trial a peak of 0.091 versus 0.077 — and the participants couldn't feel the difference (Marczinski & Stamates, 2013; Stamates et al., 2015). Sugar slows alcohol down, in other words; diet mixers get you drunker, faster, without you noticing.

That's not a reason to mainline cola. It's a reason to know what you're ordering: if you've switched to diet mixers to save calories, you're drinking a stronger drink than you think, so pace accordingly. Soda water and fresh citrus are a fine middle ground.

Eat something during the night

The night's young, the drinks are flowing, and food feels like a distraction. But keeping something in your stomach while you're drinking does the same job your pre-drink meal did: it slows absorption and keeps your peak lower. You don't need much:

• A plate of chips or nachos at the bar
• Peanuts or crisps if you're at a party
• A late-night pizza slice or kebab on the walk home

It also keeps you out of that "starving and drunk, and everything looks like a good idea" state, where the questionable decisions get made.

Before Bed: Your Last Chance to Set Up for Tomorrow

A glass of water — ideally with a bit of salt in it

Chugging a litre of water before bed is a classic move with an obvious downside: you'll be up to pee. The reason is that plain water on its own doesn't stay in you very well. In rehydration research from Aberdeen, volunteers who'd sweated out about 2% of their body weight kept far more of the fluid they drank when the drink contained more sodium; with a low-sodium drink, a lot of it just went straight through (Shirreffs et al., 1996). Alcohol's diuretic effect is modest, so you don't need a pharmacy rehydration sachet — but a glass of water with a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lemon, or any electrolyte drink you have to hand, is a smarter bedtime drink than a pint of tap water. We've compared the options in electrolytes vs water: what actually helps the next day.

One honest caveat: if you're reaching for an energy drink or a caffeinated sachet as your "electrolytes", that's caffeine before bed. Save those for the morning.

A light snack if you're hungry

Alcohol interferes with how the liver makes and releases glucose, so if you've drunk a lot and eaten little, your blood sugar can dip overnight (Steiner et al., 2015). If you ate properly earlier this is a non-issue. If you didn't, a slice of toast, a banana or a bowl of cereal before bed is a sensible hedge. Skip the heavy, greasy stuff — your stomach has enough on.

Protect your sleep

This is the lever people underrate. Alcohol gets you to sleep faster, but a review of every sleep-lab study on healthy volunteers found the same pattern at every dose: more consolidated sleep in the first half of the night, then more disruption in the second half, with REM sleep delayed and reduced (Ebrahim et al., 2013). In the Brown bourbon-vs-vodka study, the alcohol-related sleep disruption correlated with how bad people's hangovers were (Rohsenow et al., 2010).

You can't undo that entirely, but you can stop making it worse: no caffeine late, stop drinking an hour or two before bed if the night allows, and give yourself a realistic lie-in rather than a 7 am alarm. More on this in how alcohol affects your sleep.

The Morning After: Your Safety Net

Even with all the prep, you might still wake up feeling rough. That's just the reality sometimes. The good news is that if you ate, paced and slept, you've already dealt with the things that matter most, and the morning is about comfort rather than rescue: water, something to eat, light movement if you feel up to it, and time. We've written the full version in the morning after: your complete guide to feeling human again.

This is where a recovery sachet fits — not as a preventative the night before, but as a low-sugar morning drink that gives you electrolytes and the vitamins that carry the tiredness-and-fatigue claims, without the sugar load of a sports drink. We've set out why a low-sugar morning makes sense in low-sugar hangover recovery.

What Doesn't Work: Myths Busted