It’s the morning after the night before, and you can feel the adrenaline coursing through your veins before you even open your eyes. Your body is heavy with fatigue, but your heart is beating fast. You take a deep breath in a bid to reset, but that doesn’t seem to help.

You’re not just hungover – you’ve been hit with a case of hangxiety.

Anyone who’s experienced the scourge that is hangxiety will know just how relentless the panic after a night of drinking can be. It’s like someone took your average hangover and decided to throw in a little extra distress (as if the banging headache, dry mouth and churning stomach weren’t enough). But where does all this panic come from?  

To understand what’s going on inside your brain when hangxiety hits, you need to familiarise yourself with two key neurotransmitters: GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) and glutamate.

These two chemicals are responsible for keeping the brain’s activity levels in check. While GABA is the neurotransmitter that’s responsible for slowing down our brain and making us feel more relaxed, glutamate has the opposite effect – it keeps us awake and alert and is responsible for things such as memory and cognition. In the simplest terms, glutamate is the accelerator, while GABA is the brake.

Because of this equal-and-opposite relationship, GABA and glutamate work by balancing each other out. That means that, on a day-to-day basis, our GABA and glutamate levels tend to be even (although there are some studies which suggest some anxiety disorders could be the result of imbalanced GABA and glutamate levels). It’s when we start drinking that things start to change.

You see, alcohol – among other things – stimulates the brain’s GABA receptors, leading to a massive increase in the amount of the neurotransmitter floating around our system. That’s what makes us feel relaxed and less socially anxious after a couple of drinks, and eventually leads to us stumbling around and feeling unable to function properly; the high levels of GABA slow down the activity in our brain.  

That’s when our brain starts to panic. Too much GABA can put us into a coma, so as the levels start to increase – even after just a couple of drinks – the body tries to counteract this by increasing glutamate production to ‘cancel out’ the excess GABA. But the surge in GABA is only a temporary response to the alcohol you’re drinking, so once you stop drinking, you’re left with a problem.

“You’ve got this compensatory surge in glutamate production in the brain to stop you being drunk, but when the alcohol levels fall, you’re left with too much glutamate – and that’s what makes you anxious,” explains Prof David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist, doctor and psychiatrist.

“To compensate for that the body can try to increase GABA, but that’s not easy to do because the GABA system has been turned down to try and sober you up. So this is why we get hangxiety – because on the morning after a night of drinking, we’re left us with less of the anxiolytic [anxiety reducing] transmitter GABA and more of the anxiogenic [anxiety increasing] transmitter, glutamate.” 

The imbalanced levels of glutamate you have the morning after a night out are also to blame for why everything feels so bright and overwhelming – the chemicals in your brain are firing extra fast.

The added inflammation that’s triggered by drinking alcohol can also make this imbalance even worse. Alcohol is bad for us – that’s no secret – but it can be particularly damaging to the blood vessels around our brain. It’s because alcohol can trigger the release of cytokines – immune messenger cells which cause the immune system to fire into action, leading to inflammation which disrupts brain function and the balance of GABA and glutamate as a result. In fact, studies have shown that inflammatory cytokines are directly linked to an increased glutamate release.

While the inflammation might die down after a few hours, it could take longer for your brain chemistry to return to normal. Most of the research in this area has been done on people with alcohol addiction, but some studies suggest it can take two weeks for the brain to correct itself.

That’s obviously in severe cases, so chances are a night out won’t leave you worse for wear for two weeks. However, this might explain why some of us feel anxious for a couple of days after we’ve been on a heavy night out – it could be to do with the GABA and glutamate levels rebalancing.  

If you’ve woken up after a night out feeling worse for wear, there are ways to manage your feelings – even if there’s no way to rid yourself of hangxiety except by not drinking in the first place.

1. Sleep, sleep, sleep

A period of drinking often goes hand in hand with a late night and poor sleep, which can make it even harder for the brain to function properly. That’s why you tend to feel more emotional after a poor night’s sleep – the amygdala, the brain’s main emotional processing centre, goes into overdrive.

“Our brains have evolved to interpret sleep deprivation as a potentially dangerous situation, so the amygdala, which is the part of the brain which switches on the ‘fight or flight’ response – gets more sensitive,” sleep expert Dr Sophie Bostock previously told Stylist. “This means we become much more emotional, and even small problems feel more stressful.”  

While allowing yourself to sleep might not get rid of your anxiety completely, it’ll stop any lingering tiredness from making the symptoms worse.

2. Take some ibuprofen

Because inflammation is one of the driving forces of hangxiety, taking some ibuprofen could help to ease the inflammation and stop symptoms from worsening as a result.

3. Get outside

Hangxiety isn’t solely a chemical issue – it’s also a psychological one. The morning after a night out often comes with regrets and worries about what you said last night, and this can add to the levels of anxiety and jitteriness you’re already experiencing.

Getting outside won’t correct the chemicals in your brain, but it will give you some headspace and distract you more than lying in bed tossing and turning will. 

Images: Getty