Before the list of what genuinely helps, it's worth being honest about what doesn't — including a remedy with a genuinely strange, slightly unsettling origin story that has nothing to do with drinking at all, and a piece of conventional wisdom that turns out to be more complicated than it first appears.
"Hair of the Dog" Comes From a 1500s Rabies Treatment
The phrase has nothing to do with alcohol originally, and its actual origin is considerably stranger than most people assume. In the 1500s, it referred to a folk medical treatment for rabid dog bites — the sincere belief that placing hair from the same dog that bit you onto the open wound would somehow help heal it. The underlying logic eventually got borrowed and repurposed for hangovers centuries later: treat the thing that hurt you with a little more of the same thing that caused the harm. Nearly every drinking culture has independently developed its own version of this same basic idea — Germany calls it a "Konterbier," Scandinavia a "repair beer," and Italy a "richiamino," suggesting it taps into something fairly universal about human psychology after a heavy night.
Does Having Another Drink Actually Help?
According to the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, having a drink the next morning might temporarily mask some symptoms, but it doesn't genuinely resolve anything happening in your body — it simply delays the hangover to a later point in time, and can end up contributing to and prolonging the overall malaise rather than actually fixing it. The relief, where it exists at all, is genuinely short-lived, essentially functioning like hitting snooze on an alarm rather than turning it off entirely.
Per the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism: "There is no magic potion for beating hangovers—and only time can help."
Even "It's Just Dehydration" Isn't the Full Picture
Alcohol is a genuine diuretic and does cause both dehydration and disruption to your body's electrolyte balance, so replacing fluids afterward is a sensible, evidence-backed thing to actually do regardless of the fuller picture. But researchers have specifically found that electrolyte levels in hungover people and comparable non-hungover control groups are often roughly similar to one another, and people who test with lower electrolyte levels don't necessarily report meaningfully worse hangovers than anyone else. In other words: hydration is genuinely worth doing and won't hurt, but it isn't a complete explanation or a guaranteed fix entirely on its own — inflammation, disrupted sleep quality, and exactly how your individual body processes alcohol's various byproducts all appear to play a genuine role too, based on current research.
What's Actually Worth Doing
Water and Electrolytes
Doesn't reverse a hangover outright, but supports genuine fluid and mineral loss alongside whatever else is actually going on in the body.
Actual Sleep
Alcohol genuinely disrupts sleep quality even when it helps you fall asleep faster initially, and poor sleep independently worsens how bad next-day symptoms feel.
Time
The one factor every credible source genuinely agrees on. Symptoms resolve naturally as your body finishes processing alcohol's various byproducts, typically within 24 hours.
Every Drinking Culture Has Its Own Version
The instinct to treat a hangover with more alcohol is remarkably universal, even if the science doesn't fully back it up.
Ginger Has Genuine Science Behind It Too
Unlike most hangover folklore, ginger's role in easing nausea isn't just tradition — it has real, reasonably well-established research behind it, including use for motion sickness and pregnancy-related nausea. It won't touch a headache or reverse how much alcohol your body still has to process, but for the nausea side of things specifically, it's one of the few remedies on this list backed by more than folk wisdom.
For the Hydration Side of Things
Not a cure — but a genuinely sensible addition to water and rest.
Read the Full Guide
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