Researchers have repeatedly found that around a quarter of drinkers report feeling perfectly fine after a big night out. Why?
Just once, Matthew Slater would like to experience a hangover. But even if Mr. Slater, 34, finishes a bottle of vodka, he still wakes up feeling fine the next day.
“Unless they know me, people don’t really believe me,” Mr. Slater said. “It’s just kind of assumed that when you drink a bunch of poison, your body is going to react.”
Daniel Adams, 23, has also never felt queasy or shaky the morning after a night out. One night earlier this month, he drank a six-pack of Budweiser, then a six-pack of Coors Light, then a few shots (he doesn’t remember how many).
The next morning, while his friends groaned, he woke up at 6:30 a.m. and ran four miles.
Scientists have a term for people like Mr. Slater and Mr. Adams: “hangover resistant.” And over the last decade and a half, researchers have tried to understand why some people feel weary and wrung-out the day after drinking — and others feel nothing at all.
It’s tricky to determine just how many people are truly hangover resistant. Much of the research relies on trial participants to describe the agony of their own hangovers, a subjective measure. After all, a headache that feels excruciating to one person might not seem worth mentioning to another.
One of the first studies to show the prevalence of hangover resistance was published in 2008. The researchers happened upon the phenomenon by accident, said Jonathan Howland, a professor emeritus at Boston University School of Medicine and one of the paper’s authors. They had been trying to understand how heavy drinking affected people’s performance at work the next day, only to discover nearly a quarter did not get hungover at all.