Researchers have tried to understand why some people feel weary and wrung-out the day after drinking – and others feel nothing at all. Illustration / Nada Hayek, The New York Times
Researchers have tried to understand why some people feel weary and wrung-out the day after drinking – and others feel nothing at all. Illustration / Nada Hayek, The New York Times
Researchers have repeatedly found that around a quarter of drinkers report feeling perfectly fine after a big night out. Why?
Just once, Matthew Slater would like to experience a hangover. But even if Slater, 34, finishes a bottle of vodka, he still wakes up feeling fine the nextday.
“Unless they know me, people don’t really believe me,” Slater said. “It’s just kind of assumed that when you drink a bunch of poison, your body is going to react.”
Daniel Adams, 23, has also never felt queasy or shaky the morning after a night out. One night in March, he drank a six-pack of Budweiser, then a six-pack of Coors Light, then a few shots (he doesn’t remember how many).
The next morning, while his friends groaned, he woke up at 6.30am and ran 6km.
Scientists have a term for people like Slater and Adams: “hangover resistant”. And over the last decade and a half, researchers have tried to understand why some people feel weary and wrung-out the day after drinking – and others feel nothing at all.
It’s tricky to determine just how many people are truly hangover resistant. Much of the research relies on trial participants to describe the agony of their own hangovers, a subjective measure. After all, a headache that feels excruciating to one person might not seem worth mentioning to another.
One of the first studies to show the prevalence of hangover resistance was published in 2008. The researchers happened upon the phenomenon by accident, said Jonathan Howland, a professor emeritus at Boston University School of Medicine and one of the paper’s authors. They had been trying to understand how heavy drinking affected people’s performance at work the next day, only to discover nearly a quarter did not get hungover at all.
The researchers conducted several variations of the study, looking at hundreds of students in the Boston area and Swedish maritime cadets.
Usually, the team kept participants in a lab overnight and gave each person enough alcohol to raise their blood alcohol content to around .12, so that they were sufficiently intoxicated, said Damaris Rohsenow, a professor of behavioural and social sciences at Brown University who worked on the trials. All night, medical professionals monitored the participants. Each hour, they checked to make sure no one had vomited.
Hangovers may hit harder if your immune system is weaker. Photo / 123RF
In the morning, researchers would ask participants a series of questions. On a scale of 1 to 10, how dizzy were they? How thirsty? How nauseous?
The researchers also looked at past studies among different groups, including high school students, adults in rural Michigan and people undergoing treatment for alcohol use disorder. The findings across all these studies showed that about one-quarter of people on average did not feel hungover.
“It was the same number over and over again,” Howland said.
The only question was why. No one understands all the factors that cause hangovers, Howland said, which makes hangover resistance difficult to study. But researchers have posited a few theories for why a lucky few remain immune.
One suspect is genetics, which help determine the rate at which our bodies break down alcohol. People who metabolise alcohol faster tend to have less severe hangovers, said Ann-Kathrin Stock, a neuroscientist at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany. Genetics seem to play a bigger role for some populations than others, she said. For example, people of East Asian descent often report experiencing terrible hangovers, which may be because many have very low levels of an enzyme that helps process alcohol and its toxic metabolites.
Another theory is that people with weaker immune systems may be more susceptible to hangovers, Stock said. Alcohol can trigger widespread inflammation – that’s partly why a bad hangover can feel like an illness – and more inflammation typically means people feel sicker, she said.
People who are hangover resistant also usually report low levels of anxiety overall, Stock added, while those who are already stressed or depressed are more likely to suffer hangovers – and bad ones at that.
So much about hangovers remains a mystery. Researchers still don’t know if people who get worse hangovers are more susceptible to alcohol’s other negative effects or whether hangover resistance leads people to drink more. But it’s hard for researchers to get much funding to study the subject, Rohsenow said. And without more trials, people like Slater remain something of a medical marvel.
For his part, Slater knows his friends are jealous of his hangover-free life. But he also wonders whether he might drink less if, like other people, he felt awful the next day.
