Then comes the second wave: a low, gnawing horror at what you might have done. You scroll back through last night's messages, certain you said something wrong. You replay conversations worried you offended someone, embarrassed yourself, or both.
"It's that nagging feeling of dread," says 25-year old Eleanor Tobin who works in marketing and events in London. "If the day starts with me doing a checklist of my things - panically checking I have my bag, my phone - I know the anxiety is going to seep into everything I do beyond just reliving the night before." This is hang-xiety, a name coined in social slang a decade ago, for the anxiety that can accompany a hangover. "Alcohol affects the body in many ways - the brain, sleep, hormones and nervous system - that all help explain why a night out drinking can be followed by an excessively anxious morning," says Celia Morgan, professor of psychopharmacology at the University of Exeter.
Alcohol affects two chemical messengers in the brain: GABA and glutamate. GABA acts a little like the brain's braking system, reducing nerve-cell activity. Glutamate is involved in excitation and alertness.
Alcohol enhances the effects of GABA and suppresses some glutamate activity, helping to produce that familiar feeling of relaxation and lowered inhibitions. But the brain is constantly trying to restore balance. As alcohol wears off, the nervous system can swing towards greater alertness and arousal.
This can trigger anxiety. "Everything is always 100% worse in my mind when you have a hangover than in reality," says Tobin. A 2023 study of over 5,000 students from the UK and the Netherlands, concluded that 18.3% reported symptoms of anxiety when hungover.
Studies also suggest that not everyone gets hang-xiety, and the level of anxiety does not neatly correlate with how much you drink the night before. Existing psychological characteristics – and potentially genetics – appear to play a part. In 2019 researchers at the University of Exeter studied this in 97 social drinkers.
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