People who don't get hangovers
 

I just don't understand why certain people say that they never get hangovers or never used to get hangovers when they drank.

if you drink a whole bottle of liquor or a 24 pack of beer in a night wouldn't just about anybody get a hangover from that? Alcohol can and will dehydrate anyone and that is the main cause of hangovers. I just find it hard to believe.

Anybody know people like this or know why certain people do not get hangovers at all?

BTW, hangovers are one of the main things that is keeping me from drinking currently. I'm sure it is a BIG reason for most of us.

My first reaction is: people who don't get hangovers are people who lie.

Ech...I don't know. Alcohol affects people differently. My tolerence never increased very much, and that, I've been told, is weird. I drank daily, and it only took me a very small amount to get drunk. My tolerence increased a bit, but not much.

With other drugs, my tolerence adjusted very quickly and it took more and more. But with alcohol, I was always a very cheap drunk.

My second reaction is: maybe people are getting caught up in the definition of a hangover. Some people think a hangover is hanging over the toilet bowl throwing up. As opposed to aches and pains and sensitivity to sound and light and mental confusion and slowed reflexes. The 'furry bear suit' we've all worn.

Guess some drunks are more stoic than others. I was amazed at the resilience of some of my drinking buddies. I'd be suffering after a bout of drinking, they'd be ready for another round.

I don't know how fact-based my next statement is, but it was always my impression that the better a person was able to drink and NOT suffer hangovers, the worse that person's alcohol problem was. Just my opinion...

Maybe when one is first experimenting with alcohol in their youth and they don't completely overdo it, it could be possible to feel "normal" the next day. I highly doubt though, that after the first couple times this is done that a hangover wouldn't ensue. It's pretty much physically impossible to stop alcohol withdrawal (except by drinking more, which is a bad idea) so the idea that there are some people who "don't" get hangovers is pretty much BS. A hangover is in itself a very bad episode of withdrawal. In fact as soon as you start drinking, you go into withdrawal, that's why you continue to drink, so you only feel the buzz and not the nasty side effects that come with its consumption. If you think about it, when you're drinking to get drunk, you're basically just avoiding (and increasing) the amount of withdrawal you will experience later.

You use an example of somebody drinking an entire liquor bottle or a 24 of beer in a day. Everyone is different, but personally I don't know anyone who could drink that much and still be alive the next day. 24 beers is more than enough to give you alcohol poisoning, and hard liquor is even worse if it's abused severely (it does depend on the amount though). People can be hungover from only a few drinks, they don't need to consume ridiculous quantities like a 24.

I really think the people who think they don't get hangovers simply don't want to admit it, or they believe that their personal discomfort doesn't actually qualify as a hangover. Bottom line is if you don't feel normal the next day after drinking, you're hungover in some form or another.

Not only did I always get hangovers, but they slowly got worse and worse. Hangovers are withdrawal symptoms, and so maybe it has to do with how long we drink, how fast we drink, and how healthy we are to begin with...... (?)

I've heard that some people don't have hangovers, but I'm wondering if they just called them withdrawals. Like maybe it took longer for their body to have symptoms, or they drank slower/steadier to keep the symptoms at bay.

Good question - I'll bet there's some info out there on this.

Sometimes I would awake after quite a spectacular night of carousing with my friends and/or husband and I would think "Hey, I feel pretty good!" and I would be up and about, bustling around.

Then...it would hit me...maybe an hour or two into my morning...aughh...I would feel overcome by fatigue, tummy issues, even a headache...

And my physical and mental (and anxiety) issues would increase as the day progressed.

By the evening I wanted to curl up on the couch with a hot pizza, and a coke or ginger ale...and some good movie to watch...almost a "reward" type of warm and snuggly feeling, like I had been through a tough time and needed TLC.

I think the truth is that I was still buzzed upon awakening.

Yuck!

Soph, that is so true! The mornings when I didn't feel bad were the mornings when I was still drunk.

I was like, 'wait for it...wait for it'. The hangover ineveitably arrived.

I am one of them. I rarely got hangovers and I'm not lying. The reason why or so I believe is the type of drinks I drank. I drank everyday to pass out first of all so my tolerance was high. My drink was always ONLY wine or it was chambord and vodka on the rocks...not juice or water added. For wine I would have at most a bottle and a half a day or anywhere from 6-10 vodka drinks...whatever it took to pass out.

I found that if I drank rum and cokes or something like that, I would get a hangover. But if I stuck with the straight liquor with vodka, I didn't. Not to say that wine and the chambord drink didn't have sugar in them, but there was something about drinking things with coke or sugary martinis that seemed to do it.

I didn't get hangovers but in time, things did catch up with me. I got really really tired after a few years of not one single sober day. But that was because my liver was getting sick.

Maybe it's possible, but I'm not sure that's relevant. Anybody who drinks that much liquor in one night, alcoholic or not, is behaving foolishly, and if they keep it up they will soon start building up a tolerance and having withdrawal symptoms and NOBODY is immune from that.

By the way - my ex only drank crown on the rocks everyday and he didn't get hangovers either. He said the same thing...if he was drinking something with coke in it or non plain hard liquor, he'd get a hangover.

Yep. For me I wasn't one to be throwing up the next morning and hanging on to the toilet all day. I got aches/pains, headache, worn the hell out but at the same time can't sleep, mentally slow, and just generallyt can't get out of bed for most of the entire next day. Then I would crave unhealthy food like fast food, pizza, burgers, fries, milkshake, and other similar stuff.

At the end of my drinking...I was drinking 6 days a week....
don't know the ammount...becusse I was a bar drinker.

I found starting my day with 2 drinks kept the hangover away.
Then about 6 hours later...another 2....and so on.
So I was maintance drinking to keep in balace until my
work day ended. Then back to heavy for many hours.

Sunday was a no drink day... unless it was football season
although I did not know it then
I went thru Day 1 of de toxing misery.

I was very :ignorant about active alcoholism.

Yep, the thing you said about NOT suffer hangovers, the worse that person's alcohol problem was totally make sense. I mean if you are a heavy drinker and/or alkie and you don't get hangovers then you wouldn't have that initial negative consequence to prevent you from drinking in the first place. Hell, if I didn't suffer from hangovers there is no telling where I would be right now. LOL

Sorry I guess the amount is irrelevant but you know what I mean. Just those people that tie one on and get up the next day saying all is good. No hangover symptoms.

I think it's BS and people just trying to act tough or something.

Justification and denial are very powerful emotions and thoughts when one is behaving badly, even for non-alcoholics.

We humans can pretty much think our way into any sort of thinking, can't we?

That's a fancy way of saying I think it's BS when people say they don't get hangovers :)

I didn't get hangovers, because I drank every day. But when I stopped, I was in complete and utter misery. So, I guess I did get hangovers, I was just postponing them by drinking in the morning.
What a life.

I hope you never have to go through that. I don't even like to think about those 'days after' anymore.

If I don't drink, just for today, I will never have to relive those days.

Interestig thread. I dated a guy who claimed to never get hangovers but he was able to sleep in very late the morning after drinking. Not me, I'd always wake with a startle four hours after passing out, wanting to crush my skull to stop the misery. Hangovers got worse as time went on.

For me, it just depends on what the definition of "hangover" is. When I was younger I got pounding headaches, dry mouth (like the desert), sick to my stomach, etc...

Later in my disease I got none of those things. What I got instead was body freezing anxiety. Often times after drinking (especailly the night after) I thought I would die. Crazy stuff... So glad I don't have to live that way anymore!!!

I never really got hangovers, and it wasn't unusual for me to have 8-10 drinks in a night (I am small-- 5' tall and don't weigh much). I might have been a bit slow to go in the mornings sometimes, but never had that dragging, splitting headache, throwing up, etc. kind of hangover I hear people talk about.

I am one of those people who never got hangovers, and I used to put down a lot of alcohol. Even after binging on alcohol for 3-4 days, I would come out of a bender feeling physically fine. I used to think that it was some great attribute, but now I realize it was more of a curse so to speak. When other people would be sleeping all day and feeling like crap, vowing never to drink again, I would be waking up early, feeling fine, and planning by next session of debauchery.

I think it's one of the things that prevented me from curbing my drinking when I went on a bender, because I would wake up feeling fine, except I had to piece together all the destruction I caused in the process.

I don't know what caused me never to get hangovers other than I am in pretty good shape, but I don't know if that has anything to do with it. I know people who get hangovers only after a few drinks, I also know people who black out after a few drinks, I think it's all genetic.