Hangover Culture

It’s Saturday morning, probably sometime around 10, and your head is pounding. You have a vague feeling that you forget something and a lingering sense of anxiety. You drag yourself out of bed and look in the mirror, yikes. After washing off last night's makeup and fighting off nausea, you open your phone to a “what did we do last night?!” text from someone you went out with the night before. Welcome to the hangover.

Drinking and hangovers have played a big role in entertainment and pop culture. Movies like the hangover dramatize and glamorize hangovers, and pop songs are full of lyrics somewhere along the line of “let’s get hammered” to “I’m hungover but let’s do it again.” Movies and songs have been glamorizing party culture and overconsumption, but recently there’s been a shift. From ritualistic scrolls through Snapchat memories and the uniform of hoodies and sweats, college students have created a culture surrounding being hungover. 

Accounts like Barstool and Chicks have profited off of drunken videos and party culture for a long time, but hangover culture is something completely different. Instead of seeing videos from the night, there is a buzz surrounding the morning after. Videos about the morning after debrief and hangover brunches flood social media. Jokes about your behavior the night before so bad that you consider settling down and having two and a half kids with a picket fence. “Post feral rat behavior get ready with me” videos are posted, and TikToks of people so down bad that they were “entering their Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grandparents era.”

This has especially become prevalent in college towns. While this inherently comes with the party scene and college in general, there is a special kind of ritualization that is happening with the hangover culture. People have their post-night-out routines ritualized down to their preference of Liquid IV flavor or Gatorade color. With this idea of a routine hangover, there is a normalization of increased consumption of alcohol.

With hangover culture comes the expectation of overconsumption. The hangovers that are bad enough and entertaining enough to create content about are not normally the result of safe drinking habits. The message being promoted is “if you're not hungover, you're not going hard enough.” Blacking out has become something that’s joked about or even seen as the mark of a good night out. This way of thinking promotes dangerous ideas, and it’s important to recognize what messages this type of content is promoting.

Drinking can result in fun stories and rough mornings to laugh about later, but overconsumption can have serious risks. Instead of waking up to a minor headache, you could potentially wake up disoriented and in a place you don’t recognize. So when we talk about party culture, and thus, hangover culture, we do have to acknowledge the negative effects it can cause. So have fun and have some rough mornings, but make sure to still practice safe drinking habits. To keep yourself safe, always make sure to eat a full meal and drink water when you’re going out and know you’re drinking limits. Always make sure to seek medical attention when necessary and watch your drinks. 

@gabrielle.kenyon

Image Cr. Alessandro Rossi via Unsplash