It’s noon and you’re asking yourself, “What happened last night?” Your head is pounding, you never remember the sun being so bright, you have this urgent craving for an egg sandwich. Essentially this is what you imagine what being run over by a car feels like. You’re hungover and you’re miserable.
Though you can prevent hangovers by eating certain foods, sometimes they’re just aren’t preventable. And without a doubt, hangovers are the worst part of any weekend.
But how many times in your life do actually spend feeling horrible after a night out? Well, according to a UK survey: 2 years.
The survey asked 2,000 people in the UK how many days per month the woke up feeling under the weather as a result of consuming alcohol the night prior. The average result was “once a month.” Which eventually adds up to about 724 days per year over your lifetime, or 2 whole years.
It sounds crazy, but the math makes sense. If you wake up with a hangover once a month, then you’re hungover about 12 days per year. Say you continue to drink from your 18th birthday (the legal drinking age in the UK) until you’re about 80 or so. After about 60 years of drinking, you would have eventually spent about 724 days hungover.
But that’s to say that you only experience a hangover once a month. If you’re frequently binge drinking, its likely that you experience a hangover even more often than once a month, meaning that you’ll be spending more than two years of your life hungover.
With that in mind, maybe next time you go out, you’ll try some hangover free beer. (Thank you, science). And if all else fails, you could always try Anthony Bourdain’s hangover cure.