What's normal cure for a hangover? Full English and a couple of paracetamol? Hair of the dog? Or, maybe you’re just happy if you manage to negotiate a pair of sweatpants without injuring yourself and make it downstairs for a Netflix marathon.
However, before you decide on any of these, I’m here to tell you that there is another way and that’s to use a yoga flow to try and make you feel human again. How do I know? Well, after one particularly boozy night out celebrating a colleague’s birthday!
I decided to try this particular cure for the morning after.
Thankfully, it didn’t involve making it to an 8am class but instead was waiting for me on a YouTube tutorial when I was ready to face the day, or at least, when I managed to muster enough strength to open my MacBook.
Thankfully, it all started very gently, with some head rolls and an attempt to “rinse and twist” out the toxins, which I was all for, considering my toxins the night before had ranged from Aperol Spritzes, strong Belgian lager, red wine and back to even stronger Belgian lager.
In fact, at this stage I wasn’t entirely convinced that 10-minutes was going to feature adequate rinsing and I was actually beginning to feel worse than when I started. As I inhaled and exhaled and sank down into Child’s Pose I started to struggle to stay awake and think I might have drifted off a little because the next thing I knew there was a wet nose on my cheek as my Labrador investigated what I was doing on the kitchen floor and whether there might be any food in it for him.
One of the downsides of YouTube yoga, I guess. One of the upsides was that it didn’t matter that I was, obviously, still a little bit drunk from the night before and because this left me feeling less inhibited it allowed me to do some things that I wouldn’t normally do if I was a) stone cold sober and b) surrounded by lots of other sober people. For example, I felt no embarrassment in practicing my victorious breath (which wasn’t so victorious that morning) something that I’d wanted to try for a while but just felt a little too self-conscious to do so in a class.
And by the end of the session, what I did notice was that I had a lot more energy than I usually would have had at that stage in my hangover and I bypassed the sweatpants and Netflix temptation to take the Lab out for a long, cobweb blowing walk instead. And that was as close as I got to hair of the dog all day.
