How to know if you have a ‘social hangover’ (and how to minimise it)

There’s a term gaining notoriety for the latest feeling that blockage has decided to dump on us: ‘social hangover’. You know what it is: a planned outfit, finally getting out on the street, walking down freshly baked busy streets, using public transport, arriving at a pub garden, meeting your mates.

Then you chat, getting a little noisier as the evening goes on, and then you go home and wake up completely exhausted. Sure, it could be because you’re rearranging yourself for pints instead of cans, but a lot of it probably comes down to a social hangover.

While the concept may be new to some of us, the idea of a social hangover isn’t really new. Many introverts already use the term in their vocabulary, even if it is unfamiliar to most people. Before the pandemic, most people really didn’t experience it, perhaps after a long weekend, but not from a few hours between work and the oddly early last orders. So, in the words of Marvin Gaye, what’s going on?

“Socialisation is cognitively onerous. Most of the time we all socialise a bit, and through repetition that means we find it pretty easy. But now we don’t have practice, so when we socialise we notice how much cognitive energy it uses,” says Gestalt psychotherapist Jack Worthy.

It’s easy to overlook, but there’s a lot going on when you’re talking. You have to watch your language, body language, context, nuance, think about how you look, think about how they look, is there paste sauce on your face, what witty little line you can come up with next if you really need to say that thing on the tip of your tongue, they hit on you, you accidentally (or otherwise) hit on them and more. There’s a lot to it. It only gets worse as the number of people in the conversation increases. It’s even more draining than those group chats you had to constantly turn off.

Social hangovers in general are a lot like burnout

Fatigue, inability to concentrate, some grumpiness. It can hit you like a ton of bricks or subtly linger throughout the day, just as a hangover can range from ‘I don’t feel a hundred percent’ to ‘my phone screen is throbbing and my mouth tastes like I ate a packet of cigarettes’.

For many people, there is also an additional layer of health anxiety. “As the disease has largely been transmitted through normal social behaviour, people have become fearful of physical contact itself,” says Dr Dimitrios Pachos, consultant psychiatrist at Re:Cognition Health. Although the world has begun to open up, it takes a little time for us to form habits and move from one to the other. Going from seeing the outside world as dangerous to normal will take some getting used to for everyone. This stress will only add to our communication fatigue.

Fortunately, since we are creatures of habit, this will all be temporary. Soon enough, we will get used to the prospect of talking absolute nonsense for hours on end and then barely falling asleep, waking up and doing it all over again. In the meantime, though, we’ll have to procrastinate and procrastinate about how much communication we can do before we get a hangover from it. It’s basically all about boundaries.

Gemma Mison, systemic psychotherapist and founder of Family Therapy Services, says: “it might be useful to reflect on the past year to consider whether there was anything useful for you in not going out. For example, not drinking so much, not feeling overwhelmed by commitments or having time for yourself to do other things.”

This is likely to give you indicators about which aspects of communication are burning you out the most – is it the effect that alcohol has on you, or is it the diary full of commitments? Using this information, in turn, will help you minimise emotional burnout. If, for example, you now know that solitude is really good for you, make sure you leave some space for yourself between meetings with people.

To balance things out and minimise social hangovers, you need to gradually test your options. It’s important to go out and have as much fun and socialise as possible until you get tired. Then we save some time to recover before we go out there and do it all again. The reason we sometimes have to insist is that avoiding situations is a very real possibility when we are trying to minimise the social hangover. This avoidance can then lead to a habit of isolation.

– You’ll realise you’re a bit burned out when your brain turns to mush while talking to people. When it comes to recovering from this fatigue, Worthy says the best thing to do is get physically active or be out in nature. “These are the things that are great for resetting our brains,” he adds.