Ah, New Year’s. The celebration where the annual tradition of pledging to better yourself in the coming months gets hijacked on the first day by the annual tradition of drinking your weight in cocktails.

All that well-meaning talk of getting your life in order goes out the window as you lie in a spinning bed on Jan. 1. Your head feels like Nickleback is inside it performing a Ke$ha song on repeat, and there’s enough cotton on your tongue to make a new Christmas sweater.

Screw the next 364 days of the year. The only self-improvement you want is something to hold back your hair.

New Year’s only has two settings – dull and disappointing, or drunk and disappointing – so if you’re opting for No. 2 here’s my special guide to hangovers.

What is a hangover?

Despite what the movies might teach you, hangovers aren’t all fun times like finding a tiger in your room or getting attacked by Mike Tyson. In reality, sometimes they’re no fun at all.

Hangovers are associated with a variety of symptoms, including dehydration, fatigue, spinning rooms, grease infatuation, blanket cocoon syndrome (or BCS), an ability to feel individual photons of sunlight as if they were daggers and an uncontrollable urge to watch men’s TV marathons about high-speed police chases in the southern states.

It’s all because heavy drinking causes a complex chemical reaction that looks like this:

BEER14 + Ch-U-MP = H-EADA-CH-E (X) 100

Of course, this is an oversimplification and leaves out such important steps in the reaction as drunk texting and falling asleep while still wearing your boots.

How do I avoid a hangover?

You could follow your own advice from the last time you were hungover and “never drink ever again,” but we all know that’s an idle promise like “I’ll get you on the way back, buddy” or “I will not cut city services.”

So, as a pre-emptive measure, I recommend you drink two drinks fewer than your friends have drunk so far. This will serve to remind you just how annoying you’re about to become, thereby slowing your intake.

If you do end up hungover, remember that coffee is a miracle cure. Observe this test subject:
BEFORE: Gblre zrmgle bllcrgk flr plyin coffee.

AFTER: GBLRE ZRMGLE BLLCRGK FLR PLYIN HUNGOVER!

As you can see, coffee takes a person with a hangover and makes them a wide-awake person with a hangover.  Same goes for showers (clean and hungover) and magnetic bracelets (stupid and hungover).

So, really, the only way to cure a hangover is to not get one. So drink less. For that to happen, you’ll have to get your life in order and become a better person.

Next year for sure…