The hated hangover is only a little less mysterious to scientists than to the rest of us, but evidence – and experience – suggest that it does get nastier with age.
Research suggests that our hangovers start getting noticeably worse at age 29, but the reasons are not entirely clear, or agreed upon.
Most experts suggest it’s due to a number of factors including our bodies’ fat content, diminishing ability to process alcohol and – for lack of a better term – practice at drinking excessive amounts.
We break down what happens to your body after 29 to make recovery so much more brutal.
The wound that time does NOT heal: As we get older, we tend to binge drink less, driving our tolerance down and our dehydration up to create a colossal hangover
Our bodies have an incredible ability to adjust to survive just about anything we subject them to, at least in the short term, including too much to drink.
Enzymes in the liver break down alcohol to make it digestible and tolerable to the rest of our system.
An average adult can process about one drink with 0.6fl oz of alcohol every 90 minutes.
However if you continually subject your liver to an onslaught of your favorite elixir, it catches on quickly and prioritizes alcohol digestion over other processes, enabling you to break it down more efficiently and quickly.
But, practice makes perfect, and your liver adjusts in the opposite direction if you stop drinking such a high volume: your liver gets a sort of reset, and goes back to producing lower levels of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH).
Though the timeline for this reset depends on factors like age, sex, genetics and size, you can typically get back to a baseline tolerance in a matter of a few days.
According to a 2015 study conducted in the UK, alcohol-consumption peaks around the age of 25 for most.
Our overall metabolism slows with age too, adding to the uphill battle against alcohol.
This also affects our body-fat content because we do not use up the energy stores in fat cells as quickly, particularly the deep abdominal fat known as visceral adipose tissue.
Women are particularly vulnerable to this after menopause. Post-menopausal women’s bodies produce less estrogen, so they produce more fat cells, which also produce estrogen, in a biological attempt to make up the difference.
Overall drinking – including non-binge (light blue), binge (gray) and heavy drinking (bright blue) – peaks around age 25, according to data from the 2010 US National Survey on Drug Use and Health
At the same time, both men and women lose muscle mass. Importantly, while muscle tissue is about 75 percent water, fat is only about 10 percent water.
Alcohol is water soluble, meaning that it is absorbed much more quickly by water-rich – or muscular bodies – than by fattier, less water-rich bodies.
Total bodyweight is comprised of between 50 and 60 percent water in adults (with men falling on the upper end of that scale, and women on the lower) until about age 50. Over 50, those percentage start to fall (to about 56 and 47 percent for men and women, respectively).
This is a two-fold problem, not only for absorption but for dehydration.
We still don’t know exactly what the biological causes of a hangover are, but most experts suspect that it is a minor form of withdrawal, coupled with pretty major dehydration, which we can thank for those killer headaches.
Inevitably, as we age, we are more likely to be to become dehydrated. Our internal sense of thirst dies down and changes to a more general feeling of fatigue, so we don’t realize as immediately that what we need is a tall drink of water.
Simultaneously, kidney function gets degraded. We conserve water best when our kidneys are able to efficiently and effectively concentrate urine.
But as our kidney function declines with age, so does our ability to retain the proper balance of water, increasing the risk of dehydration, and therefore, a hangover.
The Alcohol Hangover Research Group, however has argued that dehydration is a poor fit for explaining the majority of hangover symptoms.
They have, however, proposed links between the severity of a hangover and sleep, and suggest that hangover symptoms are most consistent with the effects of cytokines.
The group showed that there was a closer link between the quality and quantity of sleep a person had gotten and how bad their symptoms were than between their state and the number of drinks they had had.
Though their research has not explored causes, sleep also degrades with age, suggesting that, if the group is right about sleep and hangovers, every time we celebrate another birthday with a night out, we are probably inviting a worse hangover than we had the year before.