The Agony and Occasional Ecstasy of Waking Up Hungover in the Middle of the Night
What you experience in your body pales in comparison with the toxic chaos in your mind
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A couple of weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, panicked. I had no idea where I was or how I had gotten to the bed where I was sleeping. I was staying with my in-laws, but it took me a while to register that.
After a few minutes, I calmed down. Still, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I had done something wrong and that terrible things were about to happen. It took several hours before I fell back asleep. The next day I realized why. The experience reminded me of my drinking days when I would regularly wake up in this way: scared and full of self-hatred.
If you’ve ever woken in the middle of the night after a heavy drinking session, you will know what I’m talking about. At first, you might notice the sharp, bitter taste at the back of your throat. The pounding headache. The insatiable thirst. But what you experience in your body pales in comparison with the toxic chaos in your mind.
Visual fragments come piercing through, in random order, in various states of blurriness. As your headache intensifies, you try to figure out which of these fragments are true and which ones are not. Did you really drunkenly confess to your new boss that you lied in your job interview, or did you just think you did? This process can take hours; it’s excruciating. All you want to do is fall back asleep, to stop looking at the fragments, but your brain won’t let you.
My 3 AM hangxiety attacks, as I like to call them, felt worse than when I woke in hospital, age 16, after a snowboarding accident. I suffered a mild traumatic brain injury and couldn’t remember what had happened. Waking up to my dad asking, half-jokingly, “Do you remember who I am?” was unpleasant for sure. But it was nothing compared to the time I woke up after an office party to vague memories of dancing barefoot on tables, losing my shoes and my handbag, and slurring incomprehensible sentences to colleagues I’d never spoken to before.
Messy nights out often lead to the worst 3 AM hangxiety attacks as other people witness your unruly drunkenness. But the 3 AM hangxiety attack can be equally debilitating when you’re drinking on your own, as I was, especially during the first year of the pandemic.
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” the late Joan Didion wrote in her essay “On Keeping A Notebook.” Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 AM of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
In this essay, Didion wasn’t writing about hangxiety specifically. Still, her observation is particularly pertinent for people who have a complicated relationship with alcohol — because those same people often have a complicated relationship with their past selves, too. We drink to get away from these selves, to erase them. But the very substance that we use to obliterate these past selves is the same substance that brings them back to life in the middle of the night. Of course, we detest our current selves, too, and that’s the whole point of this cruel exercise: to search for more evidence of our inadequacy and worthlessness.
In a sadistic twist, there were times in my life when I convinced myself that I enjoyed these moments. This was particularly true towards the end of my drinking career. Each time I woke up hungover and engaged in self-abuse, I found many new things to hate. I believed I needed to keep digging. Perhaps there were more profound truths about myself I had yet to uncover. Now I think this was a malicious, last-ditch effort to convince myself I needed to keep drinking alcohol, even when deep down I knew I had to stop.
One of the most rewarding things about early sobriety was that these 3 AM hangxiety attacks ceased. I couldn’t believe it at first, even though I knew my drinking caused them. A good night’s sleep, free of self-flagellation, felt like an indulgence, a luxury, one that got me through the first days, weeks, and months of sobriety. This relief still sustains me now, whenever the thought “Maybe I can just have one” briefly crosses my mind.
This article is part of my sobriety series, where I examine society’s relationship to alcohol, as well as my own. If you’d like stories like this in your inbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter on Medium.
