How Hungover Are Your Coworkers? [Infographic]

It’s Thursday night and your friends are meeting for drinks after work because one is heading out of town on vacation and one is a freelancer who works from home and one is unemployed. You know you shouldn’t go. You don’t even really want to go. But you think, well, I’ll go for just a bit. I’ll go for one drink. Maybe two. 

Famous last words and you’re slouching into work the next morning in sunglasses with a pounding headache and blurry vision (and desperately searching the internet for hangover cures). But it turns out you’re not alone. In fact, according to our survey, there’s a chance that someone else in your office is hungover too. We asked our readers how often they are hungover at work. As you can see from this chart, about a quarter of you come to work hungover anywhere from once a month to more often than you can count.

About a third of you — the biggest group — are hungover at work a few times a year. For those few times a year — and more often for the rest of you lushes — you cope with your pounding head with the dark elixir of life: coffee, with an egg sandwich coming in as the second most common hangover cure.

Things got a little more interesting when we broke it down by gender. There were some pretty surprising results here.

Surprisingly, men are way more likely than women to report never coming to work hungover (are they staying home? Fleeing the country? Just worse at coping with general unwellness?). And women are almost twice as likely as men to report coming in to work hungover once a year, a few times a year, once a month, and once a week. Men actually only beat women in the hungover at work department in the “more often than I can count” category, and the twice a month category.

Looking at the gender breakdown for how people handle being hungover is interesting, too. Women prefer egg sandwiches and coconut water, whereas men prefer their coffee, and sometimes, a nap at their desk. We’re happy to report that men and women are equally unlikely to resort to indoor sunglasses.

Now let’s look at your generational breakdown. Baby Boomers were more than twice as likely to report never being hungover at work than either Gen Xers or Millennials.

After Boomers, though, Millennials were next up for least likely to report to work hungover, trailing slightly behind Gen Xers. Millennials beat out Gen Xers when it came to being hungover at work once a month, twice a month, or once a week. Gen Xers were most likely to come to work hungover a few times a year, and more often than they can count.

There’s a big generational divide when it comes to your hangover cure, too.

While everyone loves their coffee, Millennials were the most likely to pick coconut water instead. And it seems like Baby Boomers have yet to discover the egg sandwich as a hangover cure.