You know the story; you have a nasty cold that has set in and you spent the night before coughing or blowing your nose all night. It’s bedtime and out of desperation you reach for the NyQuil. You know it will make you a zombie the next day, but you reach for it anyway just wanting some basic relief and sleep. Despite the claims that you’ll wake up refreshed, you spend much of the next day in semi-zombie mode, need a nap at some point during the day, and overall regret your decision.
If this has happened to you, as it has me, you’ve probably tried a number of remedies to make this go away. Personally, I’ve tried:
Exercise: I tried to get the blood pumping through exercise but couldn’t get going in any kind of rhythm and felt uncoordinated. FAIL
Coffee: I don’t usually drink coffee, but I was so desperate I tried it. It made me both wired and groggy at the same time. FAIL
Cold washcloth on my face: This one had some potential and gave some short term benefits but they wore off within 5–10 minutes leaving me back where I was. FAIL
Sleep: Going back to sleep still has me wake up feeling groggy, but I usually am not able to go sleep for another 4 hours due to work or other commitments. FAIL
Well, if you happened to see my posting on 60 Days of Freezing Cold Showers, you probably know where this is going. One of the benefits of cold showers is supposedly improved circulation. During my 60 day trial I happened to get two nasty colds and needed to hit the NyQuil a few times. However, I stuck to my cold shower routine and amazingly, this seemed to flush away the NyQuil hangover.
I’d get up groggy/foggy as usual after taking NyQuil, get in my ice cold shower for 5 minutes, and then step out completely refreshed. You can actually feel the cold water flushing away the NyQuil hangover. Whether this is due to increased circulation or not, I don’t know, but when I’d step out of the shower I’d be back to normal — refreshed and ready to go with no more grogginess. The grogginess didn’t come back at all the rest of the day either.
Although I’m speculating you won’t like this solution since most people cringe at the idea of cold showers, check out my posting on 60 Days of Ice Cold Showers as it was really quite nice and has some benefits.
Have you tried this? Would you try this or is it worse than the grogginess for you? Feel free to comment.
