Can Weed Help Hangovers?

If you have ever had a heavy night of drinking, you’ll know how debilitating hangovers are. There are some remedies for alleviating the horrible sensations hangovers induce, like sugary drinks, or a greasy fry-up. These go-to remedies are great, but can weed helps hangovers?

If you’re curious to learn how weed affects hangovers, then you’re in luck. This blog explains how smoking weed can help after a night of drinking. We’ve discussed the medicinal properties of cannabis terpenes in a previous blog, so it’s not too surprising that weed has the potential to help hangovers.

To start, we’ll investigate how alcohol affects the body. Then we’ll explain how cannabis can relieve hangover symptoms.

How Does Excessive Alcohol Consumption Affect Us?

Drinking a lot of alcohol takes its toll on the body, but what exactly are the reasons we suffer from ruthless hangovers? Well, let’s take a look.

Expansion of Blood Vessels

When you drink intoxicating levels of alcohol, it acts as a vasodilator. This causes your blood vessels to relax and expand as a result. When this happens, the blood vessels in your head expand, and become inflamed. This causes throbbing headaches that are generally made worse with physical movement.

Alcohol is a Diuretic

Drinking alcohol stops your body releasing a hormone called vasopressin. This causes your kidneys to release more water than usual, which means you urinate more frequently. The increased urine production also dehydrates you, which is partly responsible for the headaches and nausea you experience after consuming alcohol.

Bodily Response to Inflammation

Have you ever felt rather slow and dull when you’re hungover? Well, this is because your immune system reacts to alcohol by activating certain physical symptoms. This is known as an inflammatory response. Such symptoms include a decreased appetite, and loss of concentration and memory.

Inflamed Stomach

Your stomach pays a hefty price when you consume lots of alcohol. A hangover will induce higher production of stomach acid, which delays what is referred to as ‘stomach emptying’. This reaction is also responsible for the nausea, vomiting and stomach pains you may feel when hungover.

Does Weed Help Hangovers?

Now that we’ve explored why alcohol makes us feel so terrible the next day, let’s have a look at whether weed can help. We’re going to focus on the four primary hangover symptoms:

• sleep loss
• nausea
• headaches
• lack of appetite.

It’s important to note that anecdotal evidence points to the fact that weed may be a superb treatment for getting rid of hangovers. However, this is largely dependent on the person, as some people don’t react well to weed regardless of whether they’re hungover. If you’re one of those people that enjoys smoking cannabis, then we think you’ll like what you’ll find below. Keep reading to find out more!

Cannabis and Sleep

Alcohol and sleep have never been friends. When you drink large quantities of alcohol you may fall asleep easily, but you won’t have a restful sleep.

Now, why might this be? Well, booze is a central nervous system depressant. This results in a slowdown of brain activity, which induces a sense of relaxation and sleepiness. However, when you drink lots of alcohol your sleep is negatively impacted.

Excessive alcohol consumption increases the production of adenosine, which is a naturally occurring sleep-inducing chemical. As your body produces it, the onset of slumber is quicker.

However, there’s a catch.

While you may fall asleep easily, your rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is significantly reduced. Inferior REM sleep makes you feel less rested the next morning, which is why many people with hangovers report experiencing a lack of concentration throughout the day.

Sleeping is a tried and tested method to get rid of a hangover. The liver can flush out the remaining alcohol from your body while you’re asleep. However, alcohol is a diuretic, which means you’ll most likely need to use the bathroom more frequently. This makes falling asleep when you’re seriously hungover rather challenging.

To get over this hurdle, you can smoke a strain that has a heavier body high. This will relax your body, and help you fall asleep. You may feel substantially better after you wake up from some cannabis-induced slumber. If you’re after strains that help induce sleep, then you should try Pink Kush.

Cannabis and Nausea

The relationship between weed and nausea is well researched. It’s proven that THC diminishes nausea and vomiting. This relationship is well documented by the scientific community due to weed’s effectiveness at reducing nausea and vomiting induced by chemotherapy. The encouraging results indicate that medicinal weed improves the lives of those enduring chemotherapy.

This is superb news for cancer patients, but it has wider applications that include treating nausea and vomiting from hangovers. If you’ve ever been so hungover that you can’t keep anything down, then sparking a joint may settle your stomach.

Doing so will reduce nausea and give you the chance to eat something. Not only can weed help keep food down when hungover, but it also allows you to rehydrate your body with water and electrolytes.

Cannabis and Headaches

The headaches from hangovers are truly horrible. The constant, painful thumping in your head is torturous. Most people darken their room, take some headache tablets and sleep it off. However, lying in bed the whole day isn’t a possibility for many people, as they may have things to do.

Smoking weed can help alleviate your headache and get you back on your feet. Research published in 2016 found that medical cannabis is effective at diminishing the frequency of migraines. Of the study’s 121 migraine sufferers, 85% reported that smoking weed significantly helped reduce the number of days they experienced migraines.

So, if you’re prone to bad headaches after a night of drinking, smoking marijuana may be able to save you from a day of self-induced pain and suffering.

Cannabis and Appetite

It’s no secret that smoking weed stimulates the appetite, famously referred to as the munchies. You can feel stuffed after a large meal and think that it’s impossible to eat anymore. Then after smoking some weed, you’re suddenly ravenous again.

This is particularly handy when you’re hungover and can’t stomach the thought of eating food. There is scientific evidence that proves THC stimulates neurons in the back of the brain that regulate appetite. Smoking marijuana will stimulate your appetite, and you’ll be scoffing down food in no time.

Final Thoughts on Whether Weed Helps Hangovers

So, can weed help hangovers? It seems that cannabis can indeed reduce the negative hangover-induced effects of nausea, headaches, appetite-loss and lack of sleep. We strongly believe smoking after a big night out helps significantly, although we have to say that we’re a tad biased, because we simply love marijuana! If you didn’t know about weed as a hangover treatment, or haven’t tried it yet we definitely recommend having some on hand for your next hangover. Doing so could save you from a day of pain and get you back on your feet in no time – you’ll thanks us later.