Smash hit

Illegal drugs, prescription drugs, alcohol and nicotine are all poisons. In combination, poisons become more poisonous. At best, they give you a much more complicated, enduring and emotionally irksome comedown. At worst — particularly when prescription drugs and booze are consumed along with illegal drugs — stacking up the toxins creates a bigger chance of bad things happening. Drug-related deaths are usually down to inhaled vomit after taking a combination of illegal and prescription drugs with booze. If you take drugs, educate yourself on the effects. For impartial and comprehensive advice, check out the drugs sections at www.thegooddrugsguide.com and www.urban75.com. Gentle walking, serious rehydrating and getting essential nutrients back into your body, in the form of easily digested food (vegetable soup is soothing to make and eat) and supplements, will take the edge off your paranoid hangover. Instead of retoxing the following day (aka turning a big night into a bender), try sucking your thumb, soups and sleep.

HYDRATION

This is the single most important healthy hedonist’s rule: make sure you are drinking enough water to keep your pee the colour of pale straw, which indicates that your body has enough water in it to function correctly. Because of the dehydrating effects of alcohol, even if you alternate each alcoholic drink with water, you will still be dehydrated. The stronger the booze, the quicker it dehydrates you — hence, beer is better than wine is better than whisky. (If you are doing drugs and drinking, try to make it beer.) It sounds geeky, but by adding rehydration salts such as Dioralyte, or a nutrient-heavy powdered sports drink such as PowerBar, to your essential pre-bed two pints of water, you can stave off a hangover further by replacing the essential mineral salts that are required to move alcohol through the system.

PENANCE

Guilt is an ugly emotion, and it’s such an unholy waste of time and stress. Assuage with revolting freshly squeezed wheatgrass or barley-grass juice. They say it cleanses the lymph system, builds the blood, removes toxic metals from cells, supports the liver and kidneys, and generally socks vitamins, minerals and enzymes to your poor depleted system. These benefits have not been conclusively proved. However, the placebo effect of feeling the crime has been punished with shots of foul cow vomit cannot be ignored. I prescribe one penitential shot per toxin: so, smoking = 1; drinking in excess of three units = 2; and so on. If you don’t have a local juice bar, you can buy a kit on the web and grow the stuff at home.

NAPS

Professor Jim Horne, of the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre, says that the ideal nap is 15-20 minutes long, and that you can take as many of these refreshing zzzs as you like, within reason. For the ultimate disco nap, have a caffeinated drink as you put your head down. The caffeine takes 20 minutes to kick in, so you’ll come to refreshed and just a little amped. Horne says people should not take a siesta (a deeper, longer sleep) unless it is part of their ordinary routine, as they might wake up groggy and could also damage their sleep cycles. Personally, I love siestas, and in an ideal world I’d kip the whole afternoon if I planned to be out until dawn. Hell, a hedonist’s sleep patterns are already messed about.

EXERCISE

There isn’t much evidence that exercise speeds recovery from a hangover. The conservative academic hunch is that it’s probably best to exercise vigorously on the days you do not have morning-after issues and stick to gentle activities such as yoga, walking and swimming on bad days. Even army PT instructors are now ordered to go easy on hungover soldiers, in case they keel over with a heart attack or kidney failure, or trip up because of impaired motor responses.

POST-PARTY RETREAT

Consider it a mini rehab. When you start to look and feel rough, it’s time for a microholiday. Have somewhere to escape to for a weekend: a cheap B&B by a wintry beach, or vegetating on the sofa with relatives or boring (read: healthy) friends. Pregnant or 12-stepping friends come into their own when a mini rehab is required. Remember, the party season is a competition, and three days of fresh air, early nights, abstinence and regular meat-and-two-veg meals will restore inner and outer glow. Doing this immediately sets you ahead of other mere wannabe pleasure-seekers, who, by now, will be starting to enter the scaly-skinned, hollow-eyed, twilight world of the perma-hangover.

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