This surprisingly mindful hangover process comes from England’s funniest, booziest writer
Embrace the sads, rinse, repeat
The emo hangover. Not the one with good weed, bad movies, and a case of the giggles. The one when your body is a shell of toxins and your mind plays an endless loop of self-loathing. When a trip to the corner store for Gatorade means jerking yourself through waves of paranoia and dry-swallowing a weak “thank you” to the cashier.
As a culture we tend to focus on physical hangover symptoms — the headache, the spins, bloated hands, waves of nausea, that mysterious bruise on your ass. But the emotional toll is just as exhausting.
It turns out British author Kingsley Amis had all the answers for treating a “metaphysical hangover” in his 1972 book On Drink.
1. Some perspective, please
After medicating your physical hangover as best you can, start in on the “ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” by taking a breath and telling yourself you have a hangover. Writes Amis, “You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk.”
2. Read emo literature
If additional soul healing is needed, Amis advises a literary or musical approach of your choosing. But both “rest on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim.”
In other words, sit with your pain. Poetry helps. Then follow it with prose. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich follows life in a Russian labor camp. It “will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have, and who put up with it, if not cheerfully, at any rate in no mood of self-pity.”
Avoid funny stuff, he says. Instead try a thriller or action story “which will start to wean you from self-observation and the darker emotions.” (Early shades of Netflix escapism here.)
3. Move the needle
Begin with classical — something like Mozart or Tchaikovsky. Certain symphonies do what the composer intended: “in an amazingly non-dreary way, evoke total despair.”
If you can handle vocals, says Amis, try Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody — ”not an alto sax, you peasant, but a contralto’s voice, with men’s choir and full orchestra.” Afterward, you may finally move on to something extroverted and lively. Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto would “make a zombie dance.” The latter is reproduced below for your dehydrated convenience:
Note: Jazz will reverse the positive effects of your metaphysical hangover and likely complicate your physical one. “But if you really feel that life could not possibly be gloomier, try any slow Miles Davis track.” This decision comes with the bonus that anyone overhearing said music will refer to Davis as “Miles.” Amis insists “the surge of adrenalin at this piece of trendy pseudo-familiarity will buck up your system, and striking the offender to the ground will restore your belief in your own masculinity, rugged force, etc.”
4. Begin again, slug
The moment you have recovered, your next inhale should contain alcohol. If you’re anything like Amis, you’ve not learned any lessons but managed to spend the day frightening yourself with Siberian war tragedies and bad jazz. He ends the chapter with a trio of hangover cocktails. The final is reserved for Sundays only:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
6 fried eggs
1 glass laudanumº and seltzer†
º Alcoholic tincture of opium.
† An effervescent mineral water.
