Seriously, Stop Pretending You’re Fine and Cry It Out
“I’m gonna end up crying this weekend.”
I can usually predict when I’m going to cry a few days before I do.
It’ll start with a mundane morning. A cup of coffee, breathing, and already feeling stressed with my to-do list for the day. And then a memory will occur, or a point of stress that has my mind whirring. When I look at the clock, realize that I have to start my journey to work, I push it down with an “It’s okay. You have work to do.” and don’t think about it.
Except I do. It keeps popping up in my mind. Over and over, I replay revenge fantasies. Until one day, usually on my off day or on a weekend while walking outside and having a supposedly relaxing day, the tears come. They start spilling out and my breathing becomes quick and labored, and I can’t think straight.
“Holding it in” isn’t always healthy
When you’re pushing down your stress and bottling up your negative emotions, you’re engaging in repressive coping. While shoving these feelings down helps you get on with your day, they lead to serious health risks. Turns out, avoiding your feelings isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
There are three types of tears: basal, reflexive, and emotional. The first two keep our corneas healthy and protect our eyes from physical damage. Emotional tears, however, are the most vulnerable but crucial to spill.
The Benefits of Crying
“Researchers have established that crying releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins. These feel-good chemicals help ease both physical and emotional pain.” Harvard Health Publishing
Emotional tears are cried when we’re stressed, sad, angry, or happy. Releasing them is the key to a more well-regulated body, and probably a happier life. The benefits are two-fold.
Stress is literally flushed out of your body
When you’re stressed or in danger, your body gets creates a lot of cortisol, the main stress hormone, to deal with the threat. Your pituitary gland (brain) tells your adrenal glands (kidney) to create cortisol and helps distribute it throughout your body.
Cortisol can help your body respond to stress, but can overload it too. The problem is our bodies have not adapted to modern-day stressors. So our stress system is virtually the same as when our species had to be on alert for prowling tigers rather than bills.
Your eyelids have tear glands, and these are connected to your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems: the former hype up your body while the latter brings it back down. If you’re in a high state of arousal throughout the week, and then you’ve reached a relatively free weekend, your parasympathetic nervous system will be working overtime to bring your body back to a resting state. Since it’s well connected to your tear ducts, that might involve crying.
Emotional tears are self-soothing painkillers
The more positive effects of crying come after it’s over. Emotional crying releases a lot of endogenous opioids — naturally occurring “pain-killers” — to help alleviate physical and emotional pain. Not only that, but this “after-cry glow” can leave us in a much better mood!
Crying as a self-soothing practice could help you deal with negative emotions that you’re trying to conceal. Also called response-focused emotional regulation, not working through intense negative emotions you’ve been forced to hide can seriously affect your psychological wellbeing. Some researchers think the act of crying itself helps bring your body back in “balance.”
Schedule Time to Cry
Unfortunately, we can’t burst into tears whenever we feel like it. So do what many others are already doing — schedule time to cry!
Scheduling time to cry doesn’t mean you’ll stop feeling sad, or even reduce the amount of time you feel sad. But it can improve your relationship with sadness.
By making time to intentionally approach and be with negative feelings like sadness and grief, we train our minds not to be afraid of them. The result is a stronger capacity to observe and tolerate our painful emotions without getting lost in them. Nick Wignall
You don’t have to be grandiose about your crying sessions — or ‘Scheduled Sadness’ as Nick Wignall calls them. Block off a small portion on your calendar and start small. Write about the things that make you sad. Listen to a sad song playlist. Wrap yourself in a blanket in bed and let yourself sit in your feelings. If you haven’t let your emotions out in a while, it might be awkward and uncomfortable. But your mental well-being will thank you in the long run.
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