If you often have a bit too much to drink, this habit may start to interfere with your daily life and prevent you from attending to your responsibilities. When you find yourself intoxicated at a time when you know you really shouldn’t be, you may start looking for ways to sober up fast. Unfortunately, this isn’t really possible as you can only sober up once your body has fully processed the alcohol — and you can’t do much to speed that up. However, there are some tips and tricks that can help you appear a little bit more alert if you need to.
How Long Does It Take to Get Sober?
You may be aware that alcohol doesn’t get processed in the body in the same way as food, for instance. Instead, it enters the bloodstream and gets absorbed by various organs until it’s eventually metabolized by the liver. However, the liver only has so much capacity for detoxication — so if you’ve drunk a lot, you may remain intoxicated for quite a while. As a general rule, the body needs an hour per standard drink to fully process the alcohol. What counts as a standard drink? About 12 fluid ounces of beer, 5 fl oz of wine, and 1.5 fl oz of high-proof spirits.
While you should never drink alcohol if you don’t have enough time to sober up, we do understand that you can sometimes underestimate how many drinks you’ve had or have an appointment come up unexpectedly. So, here are some tricks on how to make yourself appear a little bit more sober than you actually are. Please keep in mind that you should never do anything that requires your unimpaired judgement and can cause you to pose a danger to others — such as driving, operating machinery, or taking care of small children. In those cases, you absolutely have to leave enough time to sober up fully.
In less serious circumstances, here are some things you can do. First of all, coffee and energy drinks can give you a bout of energy that makes you feel significantly more alert — even if it doesn’t truly sober you up. Eating something and drinking plenty of water can slow down the absorption of alcohol, which will make it less likely that you get extremely drunk very quickly. You may feel energized from taking a cold shower but make sure that you set the water to a reasonable temperature, as freezing cold water might put you in shock. If you tend to get headaches while drunk or hungover, taking some ibuprofen can relieve those symptoms and increase your ability to get things done.
Are You Worried about Your Drinking Habit?
Whether you’re starting to get concerned about yours or a loved one’s drinking habit, or you’re already set on joining us at East Point Recovery Center, we are here to help you. We fuse the classic and well-established 12-step method with clinically-proven modalities in order to provide the optimal tailor-made services to each patient. We offer both inpatient and outpatient services of varying intensities that can suit every lifestyle and stage of recovery. Please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll talk you through your options — no commitment necessary.