Why hangovers get worse as you get older

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Readers of a certain age may have begun to suspect that downing a few drinks for Christmas cheer no longer gives the same experience it once did. The studies show your feelings are right: those glasses of wine do seem to leave their mark for longer (and a bit more heavily) as you age.

Ageing bodies tend to gain fat at the expense of muscle mass, for a start. Lean muscles hold lots of water, and alcohol is water soluble. As a result, the less muscle a body has, the fewer drinks it can agreeably absorb.

Uncomfortably quick jumps in levels of blood alcohol are one result. Harsher after-effects are another. In a study of 48 social drinkers published in Alcohol in 2022, participants spent nearly three hours on an alcohol drip that maintained a blood level of 0.05%.

Using body scans, the researchers had previously measured the lean body mass of each participant. The older participants (aged 55 to 65) had less muscle, and therefore body water, than the younger ones (aged 21 to 25), and that mattered. Though the older group felt just as intoxicated, it also reported, crucially, feeling less pleasure.

Getting older also tends to reduce the size of the liver and its ability to process alcohol, for example by slowing the transit of blood. That increases the body’s exposure to toxic metabolites as alcohol is broken down. One nasty by-product is acetaldehyde.

A carcinogenic compound, it can cause pounding headaches, terrible nausea and heart palpitations, as well as the hallmark of a truly miserable hangover—the sensation of having been poisoned. It doesn’t help that ageing already tends to erode sleep quality. Reasons include a weakening of the brain’s circadian clock, chronic pain and, for men,