In the study, participants kept a diary for 21 days, and reported the days they drank, whether they had a hangoverthe next morning and whether they expected to drink again that night. On average, participants waited six hours longer to take their next drink after a drinking session that led to a hangover, compared with drinking sessions that did not result in a hangover. "Drinkers do not seem to be bothered that much by the temporary discomfort of a hangover, since it does not get them to delay their drinking in any meaningful way," study researcher Damaris Rohsenow, a professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University School of Public Health, said in a statement. The findings may, in part, reflect the fact that drinking habits are determined by a number of factors, including the day of the week and people's social plans, said study researcher Thomas Piasecki, a professor in the department of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri. It's also possible that hangovers delayed drinking for some, and hastened drinking for others, and these two effects cancelled each other out. Future studies should investigate whether having a hangover reduces the number of drinks at the next drinking episode (rather than just the time until the next drink), the researchers said. Our findings fill in a basic piece of the puzzle concerning hangovers and alcoholism Researcher Thomas Piasecki 
 
 The results, published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, come from a study of 386 young adults - many of them US college students - who were asked to keep a diary over three weeks about their drinking.
– It seems like a raging hangover would be enough to deter anyone from drinking again ... but, as will surprise no one who's woken up Saturday morning feeling woozy only to hit the bars again Saturday night, a new study finds that hangovers actually have very little impact on when we have our next drink. And not only do they not dissuade us from drinking more, it's also a myth that they encourage us to go for another drink in an attempt to relieve our pain, "hair of the dog" style. It should be noted, however, that the public health researchers arrived at these results by asking 386 US college students and other young adults—not, say, middle-aged people—to keep a drinking diary for three weeks, the BBC reports. Each morning, subjects reported whether they had a hangover and rated how likely they were to drink later that day, and researchers found that there was no difference in the ratings between mornings subjects had hangovers (even bad ones) and mornings they did not. (Amusing note: Some diary entries were blank, perhaps because the subjects were too hung over to put pen to paper, the researchers theorize.) However, researchers did then look at subjects' actual drinking and found that having a hangover did delay the timing of the next drink ... by six hours, from 38 hours to 44, LiveScience reports. "The message here for clinicians is that it is probably a waste of time to discuss hangovers when trying to motivate a problem drinker to drink less or drink less often," says one expert, according to the Star-Ledger. (Click to read about a man who suffers from severe hangovers—after eating carbs.)