How to Get Drunk After Age 28
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Sorry kids: One bright, punishing morning sometime in your mid-to-late twenties, you’re going to wake up after the usual night of pounding the brews with a truly brutal hangover. Not the hangover you’re used to — you know, the kind you can sleep through, still go to work on, joke about, or reverse with a cup of coffee and a breakfast burrito? I’m talking about the new reign of terror in your life: Adult Hangovers. No matter how you slice that lime, you just can’t get drunk like you used to. But all is not lost. With this totally responsible plan for drinking that almost takes every bit of the fun out of it, you can still get your buzz on and stay functional.
First, questions: Are you old now? Is the party over? Will you ever be able to do a shirtless human pyramid with your 12 closest buds again?
- Yes.
- No.
- Yes, but please don’t.
Obviously, something is happening right now inside your body and brain as you pass from being Unquestionably Young into being Merely Alive. Guess what? You’re human now, no special asterisk. And that means you feel the sweet pain of gravity tugging at your mortality like a frayed bra strap threatening to pop. You can’t snap back from routine injuries and bad choices like you used to. That bounce-back factor you took for granted in your recently younger youth just high-tailed it out of here in a cab and took last night’s best Twitter jokes with it.
I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation for this madness, but who cares when your head is pounding? Fine, here’s the explanation:
- The enzymes we use to process alcohol decrease as we age.
- You’re old now.
- You’re also dehydrated.
- You drink shitty booze because you’re broke. And the cheaper the booze is, the harder it hits you, because there are higher amounts of shitty chemicals in there — called congeners — that your body has to work harder to filter out.
- You probably ate a bunch of garbage to soak up the alcohol, or worse, ate nothing at all.
- You’re sleep-deprived.
- You pissed out a bunch of electrolytes and didn’t put them back in.
But unless you’re a doctor or paramedic or someone who lives near this new Chicago clinic offering a hangover cure, you can’t just pop in an IV full of saline, vitamins, headache and nausea meds every morning and revitalize before your big meeting. Nope, you my friend are going to have to learn how to drink more responsibly.
Take it from me: After years of drinking the wrong way and getting away with murder on my organs (debatable!) I have finally learned how to Gently Party. Here’s what I have begrudgingly been forced to do:
Start early.
Oh, I know. Don’t think I don’t know. Who goes out at 7 p.m.? Senior citizens and people with children, that’s who. People with interesting lives don’t even make plans until 10 p.m. But if you’re going to get a buzz on, it needs to be peaked and valleyed before 1 a.m. if you want to actually function tomorrow. Sorry. Them’s the breaks. Tell it to your old, protesting liver.
Eat dinner. A real dinner.