11 Popular Hangover Cures That Don’t Work

Last Updated on May 19, 2026 by Michael

A hangover is your body’s annual performance review, delivered by a tiny pissed-off accountant who lives in your skull and uses your eyeballs as drum kits.

The morning after a bender comes with the same tempting little lie: that some magical cure is out there, waiting to undo the eleven Aperol spritzes you treated like an Olympic event.

There is no magical cure.

There is only water, time, and the slow grinding realization that you sent your ex a voice memo.

The 11 popular hangover cures that don’t work are below — ranked roughly by how hard your liver is laughing at you for trying them.

1. Hair of the Dog

Drinking more alcohol the next morning is like trying to fix a flat tire by slashing the other three. Sure, the truck is now level. It is also fucked.

This is the cure your divorced uncle has been pushing at every family function since the Reagan administration.

He swears by the morning Bloody Mary. He also lives in a duplex with a parrot and has a restraining order from a Sizzler, so consider the source.

What hair of the dog actually does is delay the hangover by re-elevating your blood alcohol.

This is the metaphysical equivalent of paying off a credit card with the same credit card. The bill comes. The bill always comes.

2. The Greasy Breakfast

The mythology says a bacon-egg-and-cheese will “soak up” the booze sloshing around in your stomach.

The booze is not in your stomach.

It has been in your bloodstream for nine hours, throwing a small house party in your liver, and your bacon sandwich isn’t getting there. Your bloodstream is not a DoorDash address.

What greasy food actually does is challenge your already-shellshocked digestive system to a duel it cannot win.

This is why every hangover brunch ends one of two ways: a coma-grade nap, or sprinting to the bathroom whispering prayers you’d previously reserved for plane turbulence.

3. Black Coffee

Coffee is a diuretic. Dehydration is the entire engine driving your hangover. So you’re basically extinguishing a kitchen fire with gasoline-scented LaCroix.

Yes, you feel temporarily alert. So does a possum mid-heart-attack.

Your nervous system is already vibrating at the frequency of a haunted dishwasher, and now you’ve poured espresso directly on it.

By 11 a.m. you’ll be dehydrated, anxious, and somehow more hungover than when you started — which isn’t supposed to be mathematically possible, but the body finds a way.

4. Pedialyte

Pedialyte is sold next to the diapers and not next to the wine for a reason. The product was designed for children with explosive diarrhea.

You are now adult-with-diarrhea, which apparently qualifies you for the same juice box.

It does technically rehydrate you, so it earns slightly more credit than the rest of this list.

But the actual hangover — the dread, the cringing, the half-memory of telling your Lyft driver about your father — Pedialyte cannot fix.

Pedialyte does not negotiate with your bad decisions. Pedialyte is a babysitter. The decisions are still yours.

5. Pickle Juice

At some point a guy with a podcast told you pickle juice cures hangovers, and now here you are drinking brine straight from the jar like a feral raccoon at a downtown bodega.

The pitch is electrolytes. Which Pedialyte already supplied without turning your kitchen into a Jewish deli’s regrets.

Pickle juice contains so much sodium that you’ve essentially traded dehydration for a slightly more pretentious dehydration.

You’re not curing anything. You’re just being weird about pickles in a public way.

6. The Banana

The banana cure was invented by someone who heard that bananas contain potassium and alcohol depletes potassium and then stopped researching at that exact moment.

A single banana contains roughly the potassium of half a baked potato.

To replace what you lost during last night’s eleven margaritas, you’d need to eat approximately seventeen bananas.

Seventeen bananas produces a hangover symptom worse than the original hangover: shitting yourself violently inside a Whole Foods.

A banana is not a cure. A banana is a snack you owe yourself an apology for being too hungover to chew.

7. Burnt Toast

The theory says carbon from charred bread acts like activated charcoal and absorbs the toxins. Sure. And the lukewarm Bud Light in your fridge is technically penicillin.

Activated charcoal is medical-grade carbon used in poison control.

Your burnt toast is just bread you ignored while trying to remember whether the person who slept over was named Brendan, Brandon, or some other fucking B-name.

You can eat the toast. It will do nothing for your hangover.

It will, however, taste like a campfire’s asshole — a sensory experience you did not consent to and cannot really afford to add to the morning.

8. The Cold Shower

Standing under freezing water for ten minutes doesn’t detox you, doesn’t sober you, and doesn’t reset anything.

It just relocates your hangover from your skull to your spine, with a brief and unpleasant layover at your nipples.

There’s a moment of false alertness during a cold shower because your body briefly believes it is dying — which, in fairness, it kind of is.

You step out shivering, hungover, and now also resentful at yourself for choosing this.

The hangover hasn’t left. It just brought a new friend named Goosebumps.

9. Sweating It Out at the Gym

The “just go for a run” school of thought was invented by a personal trainer who hates you and would like you to die on a treadmill.

Exercise dehydrates you. Exercise spikes your heart rate.

Exercise also asks your liver — currently in active negotiations with federal authorities — to take on a second shift.

Half the people who attempt the hangover workout end up vomiting into a Planet Fitness garbage can.

The other half post about their hangover workout on Instagram. It is unclear which group has further to fall.

10. Aspirin, Tylenol, or Whatever’s in the Medicine Cabinet

Tylenol while your liver is still trying to process last night’s vodka is genuinely dangerous.

Acetaminophen and alcohol together can do real damage, and “one probably won’t kill you” is not what a doctor would call a health philosophy.

Aspirin is slightly safer but is also a stomach irritant.

Your stomach lining currently feels like it was buffed with a Brillo pad and then lightly toasted, so: also a no.

Ibuprofen is the least-bad option in the lineup.

Even then, it’ll dull your headache while doing nothing about the fact that you sent seven photos of your cat captioned “thinking of u” to someone you matched with in 2022 and never met.

11. Hangover Patches and $250 IV Drips

The newest grift on the market is a $35 sticker you slap on your bicep, sold by influencers who also believe celery juice cures depression and that their husband is faithful.

Hangover patches have less science behind them than a Magic 8 Ball.

The IV drip is the more expensive grift.

It does rehydrate you, fluids being one of the few things on Earth that genuinely behaves like fluids.

But you could achieve the same effect with the four water bottles already in your fridge.

Instead, you’re paying a guy named Wellness Brad to stick a catheter in your vein in a strip mall between a SoulCycle and a discount Pilates.

Wellness Brad is not a doctor. Wellness Brad sells essential oils.

So What Actually Works?

The genuinely depressing answer: almost nothing.

What meaningfully reduces hangover suffering is water, sleep, bland food when you can hold it down, ibuprofen if your stomach allows, and the slow brutal passage of time.

The CDC’s official position is that there’s no cure besides waiting it out — a sentence engineered to make you feel worse than you already do.

The “miracle cure” industry exists because everyone desperately wants to believe the universe offers a refund policy on bad decisions.

It does not.

The universe offers a return policy. The return is your entire Saturday, plus interest, plus a vague sense that you may have promised to be the godfather of someone you don’t actually know.

The only real cure is to stop drinking tequila like it personally insulted your mother. But that seems extreme.