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Can Crying Make You Happier?
Why do we cry?
Despite some debate, researchers agree that crying is a uniquely human experience. (It turns out “crocodile tears” aren’t really on par with the emotions that lead to crying in people.)
People cry in three ways and only one has an emotional basis. Those other kinds of tears are used to keep your eyes from getting dry and cleanse your eyes when you’re exposed to an irritant, like when chopping onions.
Emotional tears are tied to our mental state. They can be tears of sadness, for sure, but they can also come on as expressions of joy, pride, frustration, anger, and more.
Researchers say that adults generally tend to express big emotions through crying and also through things like laughter and surprise. Crying and other emotional expressions come as a response to an emotional rise. Our emotions and how we express them—verbally and nonverbally—are part of what makes humans unique.
Researchers say the feelings most likely to elicit a cry will vary by sex, age, and culture. But universally, the most common feelings that elicit tears are hopelessness and helplessness, particularly in response to attachment-related events like death, breakup, or moving.
Can Crying Make You Happier?
Although crying to make yourself happier seems counterintuitive, shedding some tears can be one of the best ways to restore your emotional equilibrium. A 2014 study found that emotional crying activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates the body’s “rest and digest” actions.
Crying serves two broad categories of functions. Intra-individual functions of crying refer to the effects that crying has for the crying individual him/herself. These intra-individual functions are predominantly linked to stress reduction and the experience of mood enhancement and relief that follows crying, making them essential for self-soothing. Self-soothing may be regarded as a kind of emotion-focused coping, which, similar to response-focused emotion regulation, refers to behaviors and cognitions applied to deal directly with unwanted emotions.
In contrast, inter-individual functions concern the effects of crying on other people. More recent hypotheses on the functions of human crying emphasize…
