Why Hangovers Hurt More After 40

Hangovers, Why Hangovers Hurt More After 40

ACB’s Jeff Chenault and Tom Bobak – both over 40

You might have noticed that as you get older, hangovers seem to get rougher and you just can’t bounce back like you once could. Well it’s true and it’s not your imagination. And there are several reasons coming to light as to why this happens…

The Wall Street Journal’s, Andrea Peterson reports on drinking as we age…and in doing so helped he us feel better about increasingly feeling much worse…

Age Amplifies Everything

According to Peterson the effects of alcohol get amplified as we age and hangovers get more complicated. Older people simply can’t handle alcohol in the way they could during their college years when drinking daily was a way of life.  And she cites health experts (much smarter than us) to explain this transition:

Part of the issue is that people in their 40s and older simply tend not to drink as much or as often as those in their 20s and 30s, which lowers tolerance. “You’re becoming more work-oriented, more family-oriented,” says Robert Pandina, director of the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University. So when you do drink “you might have a more sensitive response to alcohol because you’ve lowered your exposure to alcohol over all.”

 

Body Mass Changes

As many of us are all too aware our bodies change significantly as we age – muscle mass declines and fat unfortunately increases.

Experts like Dr Reid Blackwelder (President of the American Academy of Family Physicians as well a practicing doctor) explains how these changes in our composition affects the speed with which alcohol enters our bloodstream:

Hangovers, Why Hangovers Hurt More After 40

ACB’s Tom Bobak at the 2016 CBC

Alcohol isn’t distributed in fat. People also have less total body water as they get older. So if several people have the same amount to drink, those with more fat and less muscle and body water will have more alcohol circulating in their bloodstream. (This is also partly why women of any age tend to feel alcohol’s effects more than men.)

And the amount of water in our system is also a HUGE factor:

“A lot of older people are borderline dehydrated. They have less body water just from the natural effects of aging,” Dr. Blackwelder says. It helps to drink water and have a full stomach when knocking one back.

Age-Related Cognitive Decline

Age comes with wear and tear, and past behavior further accentuates drinking’s consequences. Health experts now feel strongly that even normal age-related decline in brain functions impacts the hangovers we suffer as we get older. “Particularly beginning in the 50s and 60s, the brain is more sensitive to alcohol,” Peterson reports. “Booze basically enhances normal age-related cognitive decline. Neurons lose speed. “

Alcohol and Sleep Patterns

One of the most common ways that people combat hangovers is to stay in bed and try to sleep it off. Unfortunately that option becomes all the more elusive as we age. Deep sleep itself gets more difficult and fragmented to achieve.

Peterson writes that as we get older we’re simply “more affected by alcohol’s impact on sleep, a fact that can turn a mild hangover into a must-stay-in-bed-all-day affair.”

Bottom Line

It’s been said that “with age comes wisdom.” And while that may be true, clearly everything else falls apart. So keep that in mind as you drink your way into the new year…. especially if you’re looking back at 40.

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