3 Day Hangover December?

Sabrina Vallis
3 min readNov 29, 2023

The anatomy of alcohol detox after too much in the holidays.

Photo by Gaby Dyson on Unsplash

Mulled wine and mincepies are the staple of the songs and parties of the holidays. But the party can leave you with a bigger punch and headache than you may expect.

The more you drink the slower the metabolism of the alcohol. So where as it used to be the norm (as told to me by a lawyer) that one unit per hour was the rule of thumb and given a standard glass of wine used to be 125ml then it would take just over an hour, the standard pub measure seems to be 250ml which takes 3 hours and that is just the start for many of us at this time of year.

So two pub measures of wine could theoretically take 6 hours to process and where does 3 or 4 leave us when we are doing the school run in the morning or the morning commute?

Oh! Do I hear you say is that why the police like to be out and about first thing in the morning in December?

According to figures quoted by Auto Express:

Almost a fifth of all drink-driving arrests are made the morning after, according to new data. Government figures show that 17.8 per cent of drink-driving convictions and a third of all breath tests are for drivers who are stopped by police between the hours of 7am and 1pm.

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Sabrina Vallis

Sobriety writer. NLP Master Practitioner and Nutritionist. Current research: Addiction and the Brain: Ways to Heal. Neuroscience helps us quit.