(Time) - A new study suggests using a smaller glass, keeping your glass on the table while you pour, and never filling it over half-full.

If you’re like most people, your brain loves it when you drink—and it shows you its appreciation by rewarding you for it. A few sips of the right stuff and you feel funnier, smarter, more confident, and certainly more attractive to the opposite sex—even if not all of this stands up to later, sober scrutiny. Your body, however, was never consulted on the deal, which may be why it makes you feel absolutely lousy the day after a night on the tiles.

Down through millennia, drinkers have sought to thread that brain-body needle, drinking just enough to have fun but not so much as to be miserable in the morning, and there have been no shortage of strategies: take a glass of water between each drink; hold it to one drink per hour. Now, a study in the International Journal of Drug Policy, conducted by researchers at Iowa State and Cornell Universities, takes a new look at the cues and conditions that cause people to drink too much and, more important, suggests ways to avoid them.

For all its cultivated rep, it’s wine that can cause drinkers the most headaches—literally and otherwise—because in many situations it’s hard to gauge how much you’re consuming. Beer is typically served in bottles or cans, which are easy enough to keep track of. And liquor is often poured and mixed by the shot—one of the few units of measure that enjoys diplomatic recognition in both the imperial and metric scales. But wine? That comes in wide glasses and narrow glasses, stemless glasses and flutes; often as not you free-pour it—about the least precise method of portion control imaginable—and while wine frequently accompanies a meal, it’s just as often simply walk-and-talk party fuel.