It was a Friday morning and I’d managed to nab a window seat on the train. But I barely noticed my victory or indeed anything else during that 30-minute journey. I had a hangover and my thoughts were spiralling. 

Had I spoken about myself too much at the pub last night, two pints in? I tried to recall every detail. My chest tightened and my heart galloped as my brain opened that familiar little door and a stream of increasingly dramatic worries flooded in. Was I a good friend? Was I happy with my life? Should I move abroad? Was I wasting my 20s?   

Anxiety spirals are quite common in my brain, but they go into Bugs Bunny mode when I’m hungover. I’m not the only one – ‘hangxiety’, the anxiety brought on in the aftermath of drinking alcohol, is now a well-known, scientifically recognised phenomenon.

“Alcohol has a chemical effect on the brain, which can result in both emotional and physical symptoms of anxiety after the initial, pleasurable effects wear off,” says Counselling Directory member Laura Duester. Alcohol stimulates the Gaba (gamma-aminobutyric acid) receptor in your brain, stopping it from sending so many messages to your cells, thus putting you in a more relaxed state. At the same time, alcohol blocks glutamate, which makes you feel less anxious while drinking. It is the next day, when your brain works to bring your glutamate levels back up and your Gaba function back down, which can cause anxiety.  

“With the lowered inhibitions many people experience when drinking, hangxiety is often a combination of chemical body changes and feelings of guilt or embarrassment about what might have happened the night before,” says Duester.

A new fitness class from Gymbox aims to help tackle hangxiety. Half HIIT, half yoga, its class goers “sweat out the alcohol,” says Gymbox trainer Kylie Bond. “The bursts of work are short enough to endure throughout a hangover with just enough intensity to get a real sweat on. Once you’ve built up a sweat, this is when the yoga and relaxation comes to bring you back to a feeling of ‘normal.’” The last element, not for the needlephobic, is an IV drip, which boosts your recovery with nutrients. “It helps to rehydrate your body, and detoxifies and removes toxins caused by the alcohol you drank,” Bond claims. “It also restores the nutrients that were lost while you were drinking alcohol.” 

All this was why I boarded the train that morning. I wondered if it would actually work, as I gallantly made my way to the 8am class, which would apparently only take an hour, meaning I’d make it into the office on time (although such an hour is so criminally early for the hungover among us that there were some no-shows). 

The wood-panelled Gymbox studio coaxed us into our workout with mood-shifting fluorescent lights on the ceiling, which changed colour in each stage of the workout. During the 20-minute HIIT section, they were red and the speakers boomed with base-heavy club music – a “great strategic distraction for those hungover brains,” according to Bond. “Moving in sync to music also releases endorphins,” she adds.