How ‘zebra striping’ on a night out can help you drink less – and potentially avoid a hangover

On a typical night out, the rhythm of drinking can be hard to control. Rounds arrive quickly, glasses are topped up before they’re empty, and intentions to “take it slow” often dissolve by the second or third drink. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself waking up with a dreaded hangover the next morning.

A drinking trend known as “zebra striping” promises to help you reduce the negative effects of alcohol on a night out. The idea is simple: after having a glass of wine or a pint of beer, reach for a soft drink or glass of water for the next round, before having your next alcoholic drink.

Recent market insights suggest that this practice is becoming increasing popular in the UK, with 34% of adults reporting they’ve tried zebra striping in 2025. But while this may help you pace yourself better, it’s by no means a hangover cure.

A useful pacing strategy

The human body metabolises alcohol at a relatively fixed rate – roughly one standard UK unit (a small glass of wine, single spirit measure or half pint of beer) per hour. Drinking faster than this raises your blood alcohol concentration (BAC), leading to intoxication and increasing other physiological stresses on the body.

By alternating non-alcoholic alternatives with alcoholic drinks, zebra striping slows overall alcohol consumption. This not only reduces your peak BAC (meaning you’re less intoxicated at any given point), it also tends to reduce the total number of alcoholic drinks consumed.

Both outcomes matter when it comes to the short- and long-term consequences of alcohol.

Drinking too much too quickly can lead to harms, from impaired planning and decision-making to injury.

These patterns of heavy social drinking are also associated with memory impairments, with our research into binge drinking showing that heavy social drinkers show impaired inhibitory control, verbal fluency and attention switching.

In this sense, zebra striping can be seen as a form of harm reduction – but only if it decreases overall consumption.

There’s also a potential behavioural advantage to zebra striping. Holding a drink can reduce social pressure to keep drinking. This makes it easier to moderate your alcohol intake, especially in societies like the UK where social drinking is seen as the norm.

Hydration helps a little

Another commonly cited benefit of zebra striping is hydration, which many say will help to stave off hangovers the next day.

Alcohol acts as a diuretic – meaning it makes us need to wee more often and causes fluid loss. This can contribute to dehydration and electrolyte imbalance.

Alternating alcohol with water or soft drinks on a night out should help offset some of the dehydration that drinking causes. This may help with some common hangover symptoms, such as thirst, dizziness and headaches.

But research suggests that while dehydration and hangover symptoms frequently occur together, they’re not the same thing. Correcting fluid balance alone does not reliably prevent hangovers.

Hangovers are complex and not fully understood. They’re probably caused by a combination of factors including the accumulation of toxic byproducts such as acetaldehyde, inflammation, disrupted sleep and altered immune responses.

The bottom line is that the severity of a hangover is closely tied to the amount of alcohol consumed. The more you drink and the higher your BAC, the greater the likelihood and intensity of hangover symptoms.

Research shows the level of alcohol in urine is directly related to hangover severity. People who are able to process and eliminate alcohol faster report less severe hangovers.

Another important thing to consider is the choice of soft drink. Carbonated drinks speed up the absorption of alcohol into the blood stream, increasing BAC more rapidly. This is because the bubbles increase pressure in the stomach and force alcohol into the small intestine. Fizzy soft drinks won’t get you more drunk overall, but they may make you drunk faster.

Should you try it?

Our expert verdict on zebra striping is that it can work – but not in the way you might hope.

Zebra striping doesn’t prevent hangovers in itself, because alternating drinks and staying hydrated does not counteract the biological processes that cause hangovers.

If you drink a large total amount of alcohol, you can still wake up feeling dreadful – regardless of how you spaced your drinks. This is why, despite decades of research into remedies, there is still no reliable “hangover cure”.

However, zebra striping can reduce hangovers if it leads you to drink less overall. By slowing the pace and extending the time between alcoholic drinks, you might end up drinking less. But if you compensate for zebra striping by extending your night out or drinking stronger drinks, the benefits quickly disappear.

There’s also an element of planning and cognitive control required to maintain this drinking pattern, which could disappear rapidly as you become tipsy. If the goal is to avoid a hangover entirely, the evidence shows you should drink less, or not at all.

Cathy Montgomery receives funding from UKRI, Camurus AB and CSL Seqirus to understand uptake of, and outcomes from, substance use treatment and preventative health care in marginalised groups.

Abi Rose receives funding from UKRI councils and the NIHR to conduct research including that focusing on alcohol-related behaviour and alcohol harm reduction.