Have you ever wondered what causes that head-spinning sensation you get after drinking alcohol? Perhaps you’d like to know what goes on in your head to cause the awful feelings associated with hangovers? Well, it’s all to do with little structures inside your ears called semicircular canals.
These are inside your inner ear and are filled with fluid. When you move your head, these fluids place pressure on a node in their path called the cupula. Hair cells in the cupula flatten, sending a message to your brain to inform it of changes in the canals. So long as the fluids are placing pressure on the cupula, you will feel as though you are moving.
When sober we are able to rely on the proper functioning of these structures combined with our other senses to help us accurately determine our position in space. When drunk, and our other senses become less reliable, it is a different story altogether.
It turns out that alcohol diffuses into different parts of your body at different speeds. As you ingest alcohol it accumulates more quickly inside the cupula than in the surrounding canals. As alcohol is lighter than the fluid inside your cupula and semicircular canals, this causes the cupula to want to float and over the next three to five hours you will feel dizzy. Every time you tilt your head, the cupula will tell your brain that you are moving more than you actually are.
As time goes on, the density of the alcohol molecules in the cupula will diffuse out into the semicircular canals and for a few hours you will feel fine again. Until your hangover kicks in, that is. This happens when the density of alcohol molecules in the cupula becomes less than what remains in the canals, causing a reversal of the spinning sensation you felt while drunk. You can combat this by drinking more alcohol to increase the amount of molecules in the cupula again. This is only a temporary fix however.
By far the best way to deal with alcohol related dizziness is to rely on your other senses as they gradually return to normal. It is advised to lie down with one foot touching the floor to stabilize your body whilst looking at an unmoving object.
To see this in detail, check out this video.
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