What Is Hangxiety?

Experts explain how drinking and hangxiety can impact our mental health

- Jennifer Savin

People stop drinking for all kinds of reasons— from pregnancy to being on medication that doesn’t mix well and to save money or to lose weight, the list goes on... But for me, it was the intense, soul-shredding anxiety that accompanied every hangover that made it no longer worth it. Ditto making decisions I never would sober—some of which left me shaken up and bruised when the booze wore off. The regular memory loss after night-outs was a big factor, too (trying to fill in the blanks with what I might have said or could have done, even if my friends insisted, ‘Nothing, you were fine!’ only further fuelled the panicked brain-fire I experienced most Sunday mornings).

The fact that I could never quite pinpoint which drink had tipped me into memory loss territory either (was it the third tequila, or the fourth?) became cause for concern too. It was that feeling of not being in total control of myself, the cloying regret that I might have majorly overshared, or offended someone, without even being able to remember it the next day, that left me physically clawing at my skin. Sometimes I’d cry and just recite over and over that I was a ‘bad person’, immune to any comforting words telling me otherwise. Whilst I admittedly do have a history of diagnosed anxiety and depression, and it was abundantly clear that alcohol exacerbated those preexisting tendencies within me, many of my friends (who otherwise don’t have any issues with their mental health) could also relate on some level to the feelings of beer fear that come a-knocking the morning after the night before.