I drank too much beer at the superbowl and for a day had chills and sweated profusely while sleeping. Whenever I have a hangover, I notice that i get the chills for a couple of days or until I have a good workout.
I was wondering what the mechanism is for this phenomenon. What causes the body’s thermostat to go haywire after drinking?
There’s this volatile liquid in beer, wine, and liquors called alcohol… 
Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as swiftly rewarded. You’ll find it an effective combination.
Oh no! I don’t drink alcohol, just beer and vodka. You mean that there is alcohol in all of that stuff? 
I don’t know about having chills, but I do know that all day on Monday I was sweating like a pig, had butt-nasty headache and just felt like going to bed. I don’t think it’s the alcohol. I think it’s the Super Bowl.
The sweating doesn’t make sense. I mean, your body is basically dehydrated after drinking, Right? So why would you sweat more? And I don’t sweat that much during the day. But at night, I am drenched as soon as I go to sleep. ANd only when I drink.
Another related question: Why does one feel remorsefull after drinking even when one did nothing wrong?
My WAG is this is because alcohol is a depressant. The hangover includes some depression and remorse.
pat
I would suspect that the sweating has nothing to do with the alcohol itself, but is caused by your body chemisty being f-'d up by the alcohol. It’s working hard to break down those nasty C-OH molecules and doesn’t have the “time” to do mundane tasks like regulate body temperature.
Just a WAG - I think that’s how you end up getting dehydrated from drinking as well. You sweat and piss a lot and lose water.
Well, I think the dehydration has more to do with the nephrons in your kidneys. Alcohol in you blood cause osmosis through the nephrons and pulls water our of your system. Pluss you’ve got this pollutant that your body is trying to process and pass out through the urine. .
I don’t understand the sweating at all though because when this happens I have the chills.
But your WAG on this seems pretty good: that is, that your body is working to hard at getting the poison out to regulate temp very well.
Hmm, I have once or twice [ahem] drunk myself to insensibility and the next day felt pretty good (hehe, I don’t hang much over), but what little hangover’s I’ve felt were limited to being pretty thirst and headaches.
If I ever drink so much I ever wake up with bloodshot eyes, nausea, and a raging headache, I’ll tell you all about it in excruciating detail.
Can anyone tell me why I can get so close to poisoning myself without being hungover?
I sold my soul to Satan for a dollar. I got it in the mail.
This I can answer for you. It is because you are young. Wait until you are 10 years older and you will not have such a pleasant experience.
When I was in college, I could drink a ton andbe in pretty darn good shape the next day. Nowadays, I am hurting for another two or three.
“It is misguided to say that the poor have no money due to their disadvantaged status. Clearly, if they did possess capital resources commensurate with those of the wealthy, they would no longer be, strictly speaking, ‘poor.’”
Soon afterwards, Deimos simply vanished from the sky.
I found that equal quantities of equally potent vodka can have very different effects.
High price vodka like absolute, stoli, or skyy tends to be pretty reasonable the next day, mostly just slight behind the eyes headache.
On the other hand Bargain basment russian radiator juice like Popov seems to leave me in total misery the next day.
I know it can have a lot to do with what I eat and drink with it, but these results seem to be repeatable, which would indicate that there is something evil besides alcohol in the cheap shit.
Back in my highschool days I wouldn’t bother with standard liquor, I simply mixed diet sprite with OJ and everclear, and I hardly ever got hung over. But as Zambezi points out, that was “back in the day.”
Lumpy is right, your body is trying to rid itself of excess alcohol any way it can. Sweating is one way, let me guess - you smelled like beer ? It was either this or vomiting, pissing for close to 15 minutes (my bodies fave) or bleeding out of your ears and eyes (ok just kidding). I don’t know why some people have different outlets for alcohol than others . . .maybe its genetic.
“A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject.” - Seneca
Te thing is that the night of the drinking, I don’t have the or chills. The next night and the night after, I have hte sweats and chills.
What bugs me the most is the chills. Anyone care to guess why these occur?
This is most definitely true. I’ve read the cheaper vodkas have more ‘impurties’ in them - but I don’t know how these impurities affect the hangover or what they even are. I have noticed the effect however, as I almost exclusively drank vodka for a couple years of college (I drank Stoli when I could afford it, Smirnoff when I couldn’t).
I would wonder if the chills weren’t caused by a mild case of DT’s. I’m not suggesting that you drink too much (I’ve no room to talk for sure), but your system may be very adaptable to the presence of alcohol. Once your body gets used to having alcohol in the system it will miss it when it’s gone. We all know or have an idea that the symptoms of DT’s include chills etc.
About the occurence of the hang-over, age has something to do with it and also practice I believe. When I go for a while without drinking, the next time I tie one on I’ll have the worst hang-over. However, if I tie another one on soon thereafter my hang-over won’t be nearly so bad.
The reason some liquors are cheaper than others is due to the processing that has been put into them. Popov (cheap) and Smirnoff (cheap, but not so much as Popov) are made in the same place. However, Smirnoff is distilled longer raising the processing cost (and the cost to you) and further reducing the impurities.
Damn it I said be nice.
That’s funny. I WAS AT THE FREAKING SUPER BOWL. Stood on the sidelines, watched a fascinating game. Slept like a babe. Woke up, made friends with the nice lady at Hertz, got a van, spent an hour of carnal bliss, got to eat at Waffle House ( a personal fave).
Gee. No hangover here…
Cartooniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
Cartoon, Are you sure that you dont have “the sweetest hangover, I don’t wanna get over”
AKA a love hangover.
I’ll keep it simple.
Booze does NASTY things to your body. First off, it puts your kidneys into full swing and starts pouring out urine (you notice this mainly with beer), it filters into your brain and as it gives you that great feeling, it starts killing brain cells and knocking out the electrolyte balance of your body. It irritates the brain, which, later, when the alcohol level drops, swells slightly, causing the often experienced headache.
Well into your drunk, you liver is processing out one-third of an ounce of alcohol per hour and hating itself for doing it because the stuff is an organic poison and irritates the structures of the liver. At the same time, it is poisoning your stomach, though you don’t know it. It irritates the stomach lining and too high a level and WHOOPS! out it comes – and, naturally you feel better for a bit because you disposed of an amount of booze. So, you go back to drinking.
In the mean time, you are pissing out large amounts of vitamins, potassium, magnesium, salts and assorted other things as your kidneys work frantically to get rid of the stuff that is poisoning them. Your brain, by then, has become anesthetized and is feeling pretty good, not realizing that the shift in electrolytes has shorted portions of it out and forced it to release endorphins.
Reacting to the level of alcohol in your system, the tissues of the brain swell, blood flow is restricted and some functions – like caution, inhibitions and such, kind of go to sleep.
When you stop drinking, the body is working real hard to recover from what you did to it and often, thanks to the electrolyte imbalance, you will get hot flashes, perspire heavily – and THAT will reek of alcohol because the body is dumping the stuff as fast as possible, your stomach will probably rebel because you caused the lining to become inflamed and the acid balance to go nuts, your intestines will be full of irritating booze and will probably have the liver pour bile into them to ‘grease’ the way to push the stuff out and you might get the runs.
In the process, as the numbing effects of the alcohol goes away, you’ll experience the shakes, trembles, blurred vision, cotton mouth and fuzzy thinking because your vital electrolytes have been knocked dangerously out of whack. Low electrolytes might cause your heart to hammer or skip beats – you’ve drained a lot of the needed potassium out of your blood by then and potassium helps the heart beat.
Your swelling brain will still have restricted blood flow which will not only account for a headache, but difficulty in thinking, problems with balance and loss of some motor control. Your abused intestines will cramp up and you’ll probably get the squirts. Your kidneys will still frantically be processing out the booze and taking more fluid out than you put in. (Drinking beer instead of water in a desert can kill you from dehydration.)
You might not notice the loss in brain cells, and you might not notice the loss of a few hundred tiny nefrons (?) in the kidneys nor the hardening of some of the delicate vessels in the liver, but, keep it up and you will. The booze will have stunned your taste buds, so your mouth will taste like the 5th army walked through it in dirty combat boots.
Your abused stomach will not even be all that happy to accept water.
If you are UNDER 30, then you probably will feel pretty good by the evening and go out and do it all over again. (I used to.) Over 30, the hang overs get harder and harder to get over and seem to feel worse and worse.
The depression that follows is a result of you fucking up your brain and alcohol is a depressive itself. (Oddly enough, because it makes you feel SO GOOD at first.) With that, plus the chemical imbalance plus all of the physical stuff, you’ll feel like dog shit for a time, promise NEVER to do it again and by the next day, probably go out and buy a 6 pack.
A possible alternative to surviving a hangover is to do the following: After stopping drinking, take two Excedrin (they’re a combination of aspirin and Tylenol) 500s, with a large glass of water. Try to take 2 B-150 vitamine pills, a potassium pill and some form of multi-mineral tablet. Rolaids will help settle your stomach or a liquid antacid that coats your stomach. AVOID orange juice if you have an ‘iffy’ stomach.
During the night, when you get up to pee, which, hopefully, you will, down some water to replace what your kidneys are still shoving out. After 4 to 6 hours, take 2 more excedrine. In the morning, if you have not already done so, SHOWER. It washes off the bodily salt loaded sweat and stink from the booze and makes you feel a bit better.
Take a multimineral pill, suck down a bunch of Gatorade – which is a mild electrolyte solution, and, if your stomach lets you, have something mild to eat, like toast. Then, during the day, remind yourself to drink more fluids - Gatorade if you can stomach it. Pedyialyte does JUST fine also.
By the way, that drink for the morning after, it helps by boosting up your blood alcohol. It merely postpones the hangover. Eventually, it’s going to catch up to you. Some doctors will give you tranquilizers, like Librium, to help stop the shakes and the internal ‘quivering.’
A wise thing to do when boozing is to knock back a B-150, plus a multimineral pill before getting started. Now, large glasses of ice water when you feel too drunk will ‘sober’ you up by diluting the alcohol in your system, but you will still be drunk. Still, they will add fluids to your rapidly dehydrating system and actually help ease the hangover later.
Of course, you could go buy a bunch of pedialyte, place it in the fridge and after coming home, gulp a bunch of it down along with Gatorade and that should help also. AFTER you spend some time on your knees before the great porcelain god in the bathroom, barfing up last years underwear and possibly your toes. (Vomiting also contributes to the sore stomach in the morning.)
Now, some wines contain sulfites – whatever the fuck they are, especially red wines. They create even rougher hangovers for some reason.
Satisfied? Now go out and have a few beers.
Boy, am I glad I quit drinking. Give me a nice fat doobie any time. Up in the morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to face the workday, and looking forward to the “smoke two joints” that evening.
Peace,
mangeorge
I only know two things;
I know what I need to know
And
I know what I want to know
Mangeorge, 2000