The liver clears roughly one standard drink an hour, close to 0.015 blood alcohol per hour, and nothing you drink, eat, or dunk your head in changes that rate. Coffee makes a wide-awake drunk. A cold shower makes a cold one. Time is the only thing that works, so the real question is what to do with it.
Alcohol leaves at a fixed pace, not a percentage. Five drinks take about five hours whatever you do in the meantime. Being lighter, being female, or drinking on an empty stomach pushes the peak higher, not the clearing faster.
Sleeping helps only because time passes while you sleep. Ten drinks at midnight are still over the driving limit at eight in the morning, which is the part almost nobody believes until they are pulled over.
Caffeine blocks the sleepy part of drunk and leaves the impaired part alone, which is why the coffee-then-drive plan is worse than the sleep-then-drive plan. Water helps tomorrow’s headache, not tonight’s number. A cold shower makes you alert, cold, and exactly as drunk.
Throwing up removes only what has not been absorbed yet, and a person who vomits while half-conscious can choke. It is not a method.
Confusion, vomiting while passed out, breathing slower than about eight breaths a minute or with long gaps, blue or grey lips, cold clammy skin, a seizure, or someone who cannot be woken. Any of these is alcohol poisoning, and the answer is 911, the recovery position on their side, and staying with them. Waiting it out is how people die.
If this is the third time this month you have typed this question into a phone at two in the morning, the question underneath is not about tonight. It is about the drinking. Nobody has to answer it tonight, and it does not go away by being ignored. The starter guide below is honest about what the first weeks look like.
A recovery companion with no streaks and nothing that leaves your phone. The first days room says what is dangerous and what is only loud.
If you are thinking of ending your life, or you are not safe where you are, stop reading and reach a person instead. These lines are free, confidential, and answered at any hour.