Scholars who study the physiological effects of alcohol intoxication define a hangover as a condition “characterized by the constellation of unpleasant physical and mental symptoms that occur after a bout of heavy alcohol drinking.”13 These symptoms typically include fatigue, headache, increased sensitivity to light and sound, muscular pain, and extreme thirst. Feeling sick, incredibly parched, or inordinately tired after a night of heavy drinking, then, is an obvious sign of an alcohol hangover. It does not take a medical degree to recognize the physical effects of alcohol withdrawal. And if these symptoms are severe enough, one would expect that the sufferer would make future efforts to avoid the behaviors that produced the illness just as the food poisoning victim might avoid for life the food that caused him or her violent nausea. But, according to many of my respondents, defining and adapting to the alcohol hangover is more complicated than this. Although many of my sample respondents reported that they suffered a hangover after their most recent intoxication, very few of these subjects stated that they had desisted from alcohol abuse as a result of their post-intoxication maladies. The foregoing section focuses on the different methods that my informants used to define, treat, and otherwise adapt to the hangover experience.
Denying the Hangover
In many cases, informants were not entirely sure if they had had a hangover after a drinking episode. In other cases, there was little doubt that a night of overindulgence resulted in the full-blown “cocktail flu.” In the following story, Nicole, a nineteen-year-old female, paid for her drinking episode for several days:
Then when I reached my 10th shot I passed out on the bathroom floor. I couldn’t form sentences anymore and I was told that I kept thinking aloud because I was so drunk. Needless to say, I didn’t make it uptown. Consequently, I threw up on myself, on the floor, on my roommate’s pants I borrowed, on everything. This was a first. I started shaking violently and shook the whole night. The next day I had to take prescription nausea pills and slept the whole day. It’s now four days later and I’m still hung over.
There is little doubt that Nicole was hung over. In fact, it is likely that she was dangerously intoxicated given that she reported experiencing many of the objective signs of alcohol poisoning. Nicole would be hard pressed to redefine her drunkenness and its effects in any other way. According to many university drinkers, however, an alcohol hangover is a much more slippery construct than alcohol-effects scholars suggest. Many respondents, in fact, admitted to feeling some combination of the empirically established indicators of the hangover but—at the same time—denied that they had a hangover at all. Take, for example, the following nineteen-year-old male, who is not sure whether he has ever had a hangover or not: “The next morning, I smelled like alcohol, but I didn’t have a hangover, or at least I’ve never had another one to know that what I was feeling was a hangover. My head just hurt a bit.… I doubt it will ever happen again like that.”
Other alcohol abusers argue that there is a fine line between experiencing a true hangover and just feeling a bit uncomfortable or tired. To some respondents, having a hangover seems to be a matter of degree. Registering one or two symptoms, even if they are intense, does not necessarily qualify as a hangover. According to this twenty-year-old female, she was clearly transformed by heavy drinking, but she chose not to define it as a hangover: “Luckily I didn’t have a hangover the next morning. I was just really dehydrated later on that evening and I remember this intense feeling of needing water.” Intense dehydration may be uncomfortable, but it does not necessarily count as a hangover.
Similarly, varying degrees of head pain are creatively described by some college drinkers as “mild” hangovers. The following informant appears to have been in a great deal of pain on the morning after a drinking blowout, but he defines it as a mild experience: “I had a mild hangover because I had a splitting headache. Later that morning, I felt normal again. I usually drink Gatorade after I drink a lot, because drinking dehydrates me and I get really thirsty” (nineteen-year-old male). Similarly, the following comments depict college drinkers differentiating between a hangover and a headache: “I guess I stopped drinking in time to avoid a major hangover the next morning, just a minor headache, so I was lucky” (twenty-two-year-old female); “The next day I woke up feeling a little groggy, but for the most part fine. Sometimes I get hangovers, well mostly just headaches” (twenty-one-year-old female).
The physiological consequences of extreme drunkenness and its aftereffects are easily shrugged off by certain members of the college party scene. Sheila, a nineteen-year-old female, cavalierly dismisses the impotence of her smashed sex partner and describes her post-intoxication illness as something other than a hangover:
I ended up calling this kid that I had been sleeping with so I could get laid and my two friends dropped me off. I had sex once that night but this kid has a hard time getting hard when he’s drunk so we waited to do it again until the morning. When I wake up, I did not have a hangover, but I was quite nauseous. I had to walk home because my boy’s car was blocked in his driveway. On the way, I felt a bit sick, but it passed, especially after I arrived home, took a shower, ate, and slept. I had fun!!
To some respondents, a hangover is effectively deactivated by simply sleeping through it. Like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it, a hangover is treated as nonexistent if the sufferer is able to sleep through it. While a hangover appears to be universally regarded as a negative outcome, sleeping through the day appears to carry little perceived stigma for some college drinkers. The following respondents are very direct about this semantic game: “I slept in until about 2:30 P.M. so therefore I did not have a hangover” (eighteen-year-old male); “The next morning I was not hung over, just tired. I napped for a good part of the day, then started getting ready again around 7 to go out” (eighteen-year old female); “I didn’t have a hangover because I slept through it” (eighteen-year-old female).
Hangover Treatments
There is no shortage of hangover remedies in American popular culture. An ailing alcohol user can choose one of the many folk combinations (e.g., peanut butter and Flintstone vitamins) rumored to erase post-intoxication illness or might simply buy one of the prepackaged hangover cures sitting on the counter at a local convenience store. Or forward-thinking alcohol abusers can surf the internet and buy a custom-made beer bong at one website and a dose of “The Hangover Cure” (THC) at another. According to the makers of THC—a mixture of electrolytes, amino acids, vitamins, antioxidants, and nutraceuticals—the magical potion is
the most amazing invention in the history of the entire world. The first and only all-natural hangover cure on the market today that actually works. Don’t even think about using it unless you are a total badass and like to drink your face off. If you get drunk after two beers, this is probably too powerful for you to handle. How amazing is THC—The Hangover Cure? Imagine an air-brushed painting of a majestic Bald Eagle battling a were-wolf inside of a volcano. It’s a lot like that, but you can drink it.14
Across many cultures of the world, there is a long history of unlikely concoctions designed to give the tortured victim of a hangover some comfort. According to a Time magazine essay on the history of hangover cures, the ancient Assyrians treated their rotting stomachs and pounding heads with a combination of ground birds’ beaks and myrrh. And hungover Europeans in the Middle Ages favored the consumption of raw eel and bitter almonds to fight post-intoxication illness. Drunken Mongolians ate pickled sheep’s eyes, and unsteady Chinese drinkers used green tea to combat the effects of intoxication.15
A considerably less complicated folk remedy than those detailed above is the use of more alcohol to treat the effects of an alcohol hangover. Known as drinking a bit of the “hair of the dog that bit you,” using alcohol to cure the negative after-effects of alcohol seems to be a temporary solution that may generate a self-perpetuating problem. Drinking to avoid a hangover may be temporarily effective simply because it delays t
he inevitable symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. While respondents sometimes claimed to use the “hair of the dog” technique, more often than not they treated hangovers with some combination of sleep, water, and pain relievers. Some of my respondents claimed that they avoided hangovers altogether with a preemptive strike that involved a collaborative effort. For many, the best strategy appears to be the consumption of water:
I order a beer that I got for free and sit and chat with other people. I also get a water now as I notice my other friend did too because we have to drive home. She said, “You need to drink one glass of water for every glass of alcohol you drink.” So we did … sure we thought about the cops, but we drank so much water, we made sure our pee was white. (twenty-four-year-old female)
This example demonstrates that avoiding a hangover is often a social effort. One drinker instructs the other to drink one glass of water per alcoholic drink as a way to avoid trouble, and this advice seems to fully satisfy any anxieties the drinker may have had. After all, her pee was white! Similarly, this twenty-one-year-old female describes the social support available for drunken comrades:
I like having a good time, but I don’t like forgetting about an evening or being hungover. So I’m pretty moderate. My roommates and I make each other drink water before we go to sleep, which prevents being hung over in the morning. The next morning was fine for most of us who drank the night before, including me.
Other than water, the most common form of hangover treatment for my informants appears to be some form of pain reliever to ease the pressure of a throbbing headache: “The next morning the consequences were a very large hangover that we each treated with Tylenol and water. The hangover made my responsibility to go to work the next day from 1-6 very difficult, and I had a headache and felt sick all day” (twenty-one-year-old female). Many other respondents also claimed to employ the use of pain relievers or vitamins in combination with other solvents. This twenty-year-old male has a quick and easy miracle cure: “I get rid of my hangovers in less than an hour with multivitamins and a glass of milk.” Some college drinkers use more idiosyncratic methods to relieve their drinking-related symptoms. The following twenty-two-year-old male fights alcohol hangovers with a cocktail of a popular anti-arthritic medication and marijuana: “I didn’t wake up the next day til about 3:00 P.M. and I felt like I had been hit by a bus. To combat my hangover I ate some Aleve and smoked a bowl of marijuana. That helped significantly.”
One of the most surprising hangover cures offered by my respondents involved masturbation. The following field note was written after I visited with a group of intoxicated college males on a house porch during a block party. I wanted to know how they planned to deal with the likelihood that they would be in “rough shape” the following morning. My question inspired a healthy debate among the friends, punctuated by a shy declaration about the supposed effects of ejaculation on hangover symptoms:
I’m at Range Fest at a house party. I don’t know any of these guys and don’t feel entirely welcome. I have to assure them that I’m not a cop and not a newspaper reporter. Everyone seems to be shirtless and there is music pouring out of the windows. No one seems to be terribly drunk but I assumed that things were headed in that direction. So I ask them how they were going to treat their hangovers the next morning. At first I get the usual responses: “I don’t really get hangovers” or “I’ll just sleep late” or “we’ll take Motrin before we go to bed.” And then one guy waits for everyone to stop talking and claims that masturbation is supposed to be a great treatment for hangovers. “I’m not saying that I do it,” he offers, “but I’ve just heard that it works. It’s something about getting the blood flow away from your head.” Of course, his friends think that this is hilarious and accuse him of using this technique. So he backtracks a little. He says it doesn’t have to be masturbation. “I guess,” he says, “you could just have sex.” He argues that it will have the same effect. (Field notes, Spring 2009)
While water, anti-inflammatory medicine, marijuana, and masturbation may work for some drinkers, others responded to their unpleasant post-drinking experiences by simply constructing better consumption strategies for the next drinking episode. Thus, sometimes antihangover strategies are acquired as part of the “learning curve” of collective intoxication: “The girls and I all said how much fun we had but wished we didn’t drink so much because we felt so terrible in the morning. So we said next time that we need to drink closer to the time that we’re going out, space the drinks farther apart and not drink as much” (eighteen-year-old female). This respondent and her friends would like to avoid the displeasures of intense intoxication and so worked together to come up with a plan to stave off a dreaded hangover. Some drinkers, on the other hand, see a hangover as a relatively inconsequential byproduct of the drinking scene. To these alcohol abusers, hangovers are simply irrelevant.
The Irrelevant Hangover
As stated earlier, according to some respondents, one approach to dealing with a hangover is to deny that you are having one or to be unconscious while you are hung over. Another way to define a hangover is to consider its effects on your obligations on the morning following a bout with intoxication. According to some accounts, a hangover does not really “count” if you have no important tasks or responsibilities to accomplish on the day after a drinking episode. The following respondent embraces her hangover but denies that it had any tangible consequences: “The next morning I did have a hangover but I’m used to it. I didn’t have anything that I had to do that day” (twenty-year-old female). This nineteen-year-old male agrees with this summation about the irrelevancy of an alcohol hangover: “I was tired the next morning and had a little bit of a hangover. It went away after I slept a little longer. I didn’t have anything else to do the next day so it didn’t really affect anything.”
Other accounts suggest that a hangover is relatively less compelling if the student is able to meet his or her responsibilities in spite of the discomforts associated with the morning-after ordeal. This nineteen-year-old male recognizes that the night of drinking negatively affected his ability to make good on his obligations as a student, but he comes through in the end: “When I got home, I went to bed and forgot to set my alarm for my 12:00 class. I woke up at about 12:10 and was late to my class. I still went to class though so that is the main thing.” That he was able to attend his class was enough validation for this student that the drinking episode had little consequence. Never mind that he was late and was unlikely to be prepared to participate in the class or to fully comprehend the material covered. In his mind, he was there and that was enough.
The approach described above might be characterized as a technique of neutralization. In 1957, groundbreaking criminologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza argued that juvenile delinquents use linguistic devices to neutralize the guilt that they may feel when contemplating the violation of laws. According to the authors, one common neutralization technique is the denial of injury:
For the delinquent… wrongfulness may turn on the question of whether or not anyone has clearly been hurt by his deviance … and this matter is open to a variety of interpretations. Vandalism, for example, may be defined by the delinquent as simply “mischief”—after all, it may be claimed, the persons whose property has been destroyed can well afford it. Similarly, auto theft may be viewed as “borrowing,” and gang fighting may be seen as a private quarrel.… [W]e are arguing that the delinquent frequently, and in hazy fashion, feels that his behavior does not really cause any great harm despite the fact that it runs counter to the law.16
Having a hangover is not against the law, but drinking yourself into a lethargic, sickly mess has the potential to generate guilt and self-disappointment. The most proximate victim of a hangover is the hangover sufferer himself or herself. Moreover, drunkenness itself is a victimless offense unless it is considered as self-harm (i.e., bodily harm, damage to one’s life chances) or a threat to the functioning of the social order. The popular conception
of the “problem drinker” points to someone who has allowed his or her drinking to get in the way of his or her social institutional obligations. The “problem drinker” has imported his or her addiction into the home or into the workplace. By this definition, most college drinkers are unlikely to define their heavy drinking as “problematic” since it is not clear that it interferes with their “straight” life. According to many of my respondents, a hangover is seen as easily justifiable and quite innocuous since it does not interfere with any of their institutional demands. University students may be in a particularly good structural position to deny the injury of a hangover since, in many cases, going to class is their only formal responsibility and, furthermore, classroom expectations of the student may be minimal at best. This may help to partly explain the high levels of heavy alcohol drinking on our nation’s college campuses since emerging adults at universities may have relatively few formal obligations. The college student who lives away from home has a reduced direct bond to his or her family and, though it varies according to how seriously a student takes his or her education, the university student may have minimal obligation to university activities. One may only have two or three days where one has class at all, and one need not be in top physical or mental condition to sit silently through a class.
Getting Wasted: Why College Students Drink Too Much and Party So Hard Page 17