Feeling drained from the night before? It could be an emotional hangover.

I woke up the day after Valentine’s Day bleary-eyed, fuzzy-headed, and with a slight pit in my stomach.

I hadn’t overdrank. I hadn’t been ghosted, scorned, or broken up with either. In fact, I’m happily married to a man who rolls his eyes at the Hallmark holiday but knows how to woo me: namely, via wings and beer, which we’d savored the night before, along with a variety show of sorts at our friend’s Brooklyn loft. On the surface, the night had been just right. But my gut told a different story. 

It reminded me that, the day prior, I’d been reporting a mental health story that had seeped deep into my psyche. I’d felt misunderstood by a relative when I’d tried to open up about it. I’d cried during the show’s opening musical act because, well, I’m a sap. 

So come February 15, I — surely along with plenty of others for a variety of reasons — awoke to an emotional hangover, or that groggy, queasy feeling that lingers after a heavy conversation, therapy session, or even dark movie. While not an official medical term, the “condition” is quite common, and makes sense from a physiological and psychological perspective, experts told me. 

“Our reactions [to the outside world] are driven by our internal world, and our internal world is influenced by what happened yesterday,” Lila Davachi, PhD, a psychology professor at Columbia University who’s studied how emotions affect memories, said. “We’re not just blank slates every morning.”  

I felt better already. Here’s what else I learned about why we might experience emotional hangovers, who’s most vulnerable, and whether there’s anything we can do to prevent — or pacify — them. Spoiler alert: Water and rest are tried-and-true hangover cures, even if you’re sober. 

Defining the emotional hangover 

Different people have different definitions of emotional hangovers. Perhaps most prominently, Judith Orloff, MD, a psychiatrist and author of The Empath’s Survival Guide, describes it as “an energetic residue” left over from an interaction with an “energy vampire,” or someone who, intentionally or not, saps your mental and emotional energy. 

“Toxic emotions can linger long afterward, which make you feel exhausted, beset with brain fog, or ill,” she writes.

In my case, it wasn’t any particular person from whom I needed to recover, but rather a set of mildly emotionally fatiguing circumstances that didn’t subside simply because the sun had risen again. (Importantly, I’m not talking about the emotional aftermath of world-rocking life events like the death of a loved one, which is more aptly categorized as grief — and better appreciated as something that will and should take time to nurse.)

I’ve had emotional hangovers after finishing haunting books, receiving hate mail from readers, and getting into disagreements with my spouse.

“The day after something that’s really intense, it’s natural to feel lingering feelings of sadness or shame,” Megan Bruneau, a therapist and coach, says. The concept reminds her of “vulnerability hangovers,” or uncomfortable feelings like anxiety and regret that can arise after sharing deep emotions, needs, or desires, according to mental health website Choosing Therapy. 

Per Orloff, frequent emotional hangovers are most common among empaths, highly sensitive people, and those with social anxiety disorder. In other words, when your emotional antenna is highly attuned to others’ thoughts and behaviors, minor social blips become amplified. What’s a breeze on others’ radars is a gust on yours.  

This perspective resonates with Abby Schaeffer, a 33-year-old flight attendant based in New York City. “I feel emotions really deeply — when I get into a fight with someone, I am torn up about it. My partner, by contrast, is like, ‘Well they’re wrong, so whatever,’” she said. “For people like me, emotional hangovers are a thing because you spend so much energy just processing the event.” 

The brain and body during an emotional hangover  

While a hangover-hangover is well-understood as a mix of dehydration, poor quality sleep, and other physical consequences of too much booze, the mechanisms behind emotional hangovers are a little more medically elusive. But experts have some theories. 

For one, during an emotional experience — say, a confrontation with a slacking colleague — your fight-or-flight system is activated, leading stress hormones like cortisol, norepinephrine, and adrenaline to surge through the body. When the moment passes and your body settles into a “rest and digest” state, you might feel especially worn down. “When we’re repairing after the stress response, it’s tiring,” Bruneau says. 

The feeling could also reflect the mental tug-of-war between your amygdala, the part of your brain that’s processing your emotions, and your prefrontal cortex, or the part of your brain that’s trying to temper them with logic and decisions. “It’s mentally exhausting to be managing your feelings of anger and anxiety, and trying to be non-reactive,” Bruneau says. 

Some research also shows that highly emotional events light up the brain in certain ways — and that light doesn’t switch off as soon as the event ends. In her 2016 study in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Davachi and colleagues measured people’s brain activity while viewing both emotional and neutral images. They found that the brain states associated with the emotional experiences lingered 20 to 30 minutes later, sharpening the participants’ memory of subsequent non-emotional images.

It shows that, unlike a video recording, “we’re much more complicated in how we’re viewing, perceiving, and remembering the world,” Davachi says.  

Similarly, emotional moments can corrupt our attention — shining the light on happy-looking couples after a fight with your partner, or causing you to misinterpret your friend’s silence after an awkward encounter with a different pal. By ruminating on negative feelings, you’re (often unintentionally) delaying your recovery.   

“Your perception is being heightened toward the things that are relevant to that person or that trauma, but you might actually be suppressing everything else,” Davachi says. “And that’s maladaptive too, because if good stuff is happening to you too, like you get a nice note in the mail, you’re going to not let that improve your mood the way that it should.”

Your emotional hangover might not be so complicated: Maybe you just failed to breathe deeply, or drink enough water, or eat well while engrossed in a tragic movie. Your sleep could have been more fitful too. “When we’re stressed, we tend to not take care of ourselves as well,” Bruneau says. 

Ultimately, emotional hangovers are yet another indication that our bodies and minds are connected, Kristen Guest, a licensed social worker, says. “Our bodies are definitely going to feel it if our mind is overpowered or overstimulated. Nothing just happens in a silo.”

Your emotional hangover first-aid kit 

Emotional hangovers aren’t inherently bad; they’re human. They might mean you need to set better boundaries or improve communication or practice sitting with uncomfortable emotions and conflict. If you find the feelings are frequent and disruptive, you might need to do something more drastic, like quit a job or break up with a friend. Consider abstinence from the figurative substance that’s no longer serving you. 

“It’s good to receive those signals in some cases, and we need to train our brains and our bodies to respond in different ways,” Guest says. She recommends drinking lots of water and journaling to help you notice patterns in what, where, and who tends to sap you emotionally. “It’s important to take time for reflection,” she says. 

Working through it with a therapist can be immensely helpful too, Emily Hein, a writer and social work student, has found. She’s learned, for example, that an outsize reaction to her current partner’s comment might be related to something a former partner said. 

“We tend to lump all of these things together and it’s really hard to be like, ‘No, let’s just approach this particular situation as it is,’” she says. “It’s definitely a push-pull between your mind and your body, and knowing that you’re safe while also validating that it’s okay for your brain to not feel like it’s safe. Your brain is pulling evidence from things that did happen.” 

For her, watching a show, playing a video game, or taking a walk can all put helpful space between the event and her reaction. Like a margarita-induced hangover, time heals, Schaeffer has also found. “Just be kind to yourself the next day,” she says. “That’s the rule I follow.”