Psychology Says If You Can Let This One Big Emotion Go, You'll Be Happier And Healthier
We've been taught to repress this powerful human experience.
Kaboompics.com | Canva Ever feel so stressed out, so overwhelmed, or so mad at your partner (or at life) that you just wanted to cry? Of course, you have! We all have! Unfortuantely, there's also a good chance no matter how horrible you're feeling, you probably don't often succumb to that lump in your throat. Instead, you push those feelings away.
Maybe you feel self-conscious about being openly vulnerable. You might even worry that crying might leave you feeling worse! But we suffer when we don't let our sadness finally go by allowing our tears to flow.
Psychology's eight reasons to let your tears go, if you want to be happier and healtheir
1. Stifling tears is not a healthy strategy
Holding back tears hurts your mood rather than helping it — or so science tells us based on a study in the Motivation and Emotion Journal where researchers found crying can protect people from feelings of depression. Ninety minutes, 90 minutes after participants watched an emotional movie, they felt even better than they had before watching the film.
These new findings add to a great deal of other research, such as an article in Frontiers in Psychology, that validates the healthful benefits of crying despite our collective discomfort with it.
Letting your tears flow is one of the healthiest things you can do.
2. Crying provides a powerful emotional release
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Sometimes, nothing else is quite as effective for moving through emotions as a good cry. A complicated physiological reaction, tears appear to act as an emotional overflow mechanism of sorts, as supported by research published in Psychotherapy Journal.
Crying helps mobilize intense feelings, provides their cathartic release, and is one of our most efficient balancing tools.
3. Tears remove toxins
Like a good sweat, crying releases toxins that can build up in the body. Biochemist William Frey's research found that emotional tears have higher levels of stress hormones than tears shed by, say, slicing an onion.
Like other exocrine secretions (like sweating, urinating, or even exhaling), tears allow the body to rid itself of excess stress chemicals built up from emotional tension.
4. Tears bolster our immune system
According to the Immunologic Research Journal, some forms of stress boost immunity. So, tears are likewise packed with immune support. Particularly in emotion-based tears, a potent bacteria-fighting protein called lysozyme helps us fight illness and infection, as shown by a review in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research; this is a protein also found in human milk, mucus, and saliva.
So, shedding tears is a great way to bolster our body's natural defenses against the very stress-depleting us.
5. Crying can elicit needed empathy and deepen intimacy
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Shedding tears communicates your feelings to others and (usually) elicits their compassion, a key pillar of emotional intimacy. Support and comfort from others strengthen your relationship with them while also aiding your coping abilities during times of emotional pain.
Thanks to our innate capacities for empathy (which research in the Consciousness and Cognition Journal attributes to mirror neurons), we're hard-wired to respond to obvious pain with compassion.
Crying is nature's way of assuring optimal help from others, which can make you feel understood, comforted, and stronger to face the challenges at hand. It also boosts intimacy by promoting meaningful emotional connection.
6. Weeping can even boost your mood after you stop
Interestingly, the data published by the Motivation and Emotion Journal shows that for people who watched a sad movie and cried, their mood initially took a dip but returned to even higher levels than their baseline after 90 minutes.
To the extent that mood is the result of pent-up, unexpressed emotions, crying allows you to express these painful emotions so they neither build up nor ultimately depress your mood.
So long as there is an ending point to the crying, tears relieve emotional pressure and can even elevate your mood.
7. Tears remind us what we care about
We cry about the things that matter most to us, and in this way, our tears can help us weed out the noise of daily stress and focus on what's genuinely bothering us.
In the same way, anxiety can herald important messages that need attention and solutions, tears often quickly remind us of the situations and values that most deserve our focus and solutions.
8. Crying can boost resilience
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Perhaps most importantly, shedding tears demonstrates our capacity to tolerate and move through pain, reminding us of our natural capacities to cope with our feelings.
Knowing you can face your challenges boosts your self-confidence, which can shield you from the hopelessness of depression.
Being moved to tears is a uniquely human experience and a complicated one for sure.
Not only can crying connect us to the things and people that we care about, but the act of shedding tears can also boost our physical and emotional resilience. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to prevent suffering from really taking hold in our lives may just be to go ahead and "slice" our troubles with tears — that is when we can.
As you practice embracing the tears that come, aim to stay curious about their message and share your experience where you can.
Dr. Alicia Clark has been a practicing psychologist for over 25 years and has been named one of Washington’s Top Doctors by Washingtonian Magazine. She is the author of Hack Your Anxiety: How to Make Anxiety Work for You In Life, Love, and All That You Do.