Hangover is a constellation of effects ranging from headache to nausea to what's sometimes called anxiety , which is anxiety that follows a day of drinking anxiety . I think we can understand physiologically if we think about that process of alcohol intake , increasing the amount of cortisol and the ratio of cortisol to some other stress hormones .
And there are great tools and resources for that . Now , the other aspects of hangover such as the stomachache or headache or feelings of malaise or fogginess , those could be related to a number of different things and probably are related to a number of different things . First of all , the sleep that one gets after , even just one .
Again , please use caution , spike your adrenaline spike , your dopamine with deliberate cold exposure safely . Other components of hangover that could be good targets for trying to alleviate hangover . And here I hope you are getting the picture because it is accurate to say that hangover is a multifaceted phenomenon .
I know many people have tried that one before , but that's a terrible idea . Now , one thing that you'll also hear out there is that deliberate cold exposure , for instance , taking a cold shower might relieve hangover . I find this one particularly interesting because we've done episodes on the benefits of deliberate cold exposure .
So I'm not certain and in fact , I believe it's not the greatest idea to burden your liver further through the use of things um that are going to cause it to have to work harder and metabolize things . If the goal is simply to alleviate a headache , there's a lot of kind of lore um old school lore about how to relieve a hangover . We already talked about how eating food won't do that , but eating food will prevent the rapid absorption of even more alcohol into the bloodstream .