Morning After Dread: Understanding Hanxiety and What Helps

A clear guide to navigating post-drinking anxiety, body signals, science-backed coping tools and the products that can help

By: The Lace Ledger Staff

Your pounding headache and rising nausea jolt you awake long before your alarm.

Your chest feels tight, a knot of dread coils in your gut and a single thought crawls in: did I say or do something embarrassing last night? Is it as bad as I think?

This experience — a signature blend of hangover and anxiety, now lovingly referred to as hanxiety — is familiar to many, especially after nights of heavy drinking, when physical and psychological distress overlap.

Hangxiety symptoms can include the obligatory nausea, shakiness, headaches, etc. paired with racing thoughts, shame, regret and fixation on what could have gone wrong the night before, often worsening as blood alcohol drops and brain chemistry rebalance begins.

It doesn’t help that, even on a good day, anxiety disorders are common with over 359M people worldwide affected and counting according to the World Health Organization. Adding stressors such as sleep loss and dehydration to a possibly already-anxious foundation can be challenging.

If you find the morning after harder than the night before, you are far from alone — here is what to do next.