We’ve all been there: A wild night out on the town…a horrendous hangover in the morning…the utterance of the words, “I’m never drinking again"…But unfortunately, those words are pretty much always a lie. According to a new study, hangovers have almost no influence over our drinking intentions. The study, which was published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, asked 386 young adults to keep diaries of their drinking habits for three weeks. The participants — mostly college students (surprise!) — wrote down each morning whether they were hungover; they also recorded how likely they thought they would be to drink again later that day. The diaries yielded 2,276 drinking episodes and 463 hangover episodes — which, when analyzed, showed that ratings made on hungover mornings and non-hungover mornings didn’t differ.
Said research Thomas Piasecki about the experiment, “Our findings fill in a basic piece of the puzzle concerning hangovers and alcoholism. If hangovers don’t strongly discourage or punish drinking, links between current problem drinking and frequent hangovers seem less incongruent. If hangovers don’t generally hasten drinking, we can rule out a direct causal role of hangovers in the acceleration of problem drinking.”
The good news is that most of the participants didn’t try to pull the “hair of the dog” trick — that is, to drink more as a method of alleviating their hangover symptoms. So, y’know… at least there’s that.
