Cry Your Way to Good Health
Tears are something every single person will experience in their life, whether they want to or not. You can have happy tears, sad tears and spur of the moment tears. Now lets see why tears can actually help your health.
Tears... your entrance to a healthier life?...
When a friend of mine started to cry a few weeks ago, I found myself wondering what I should do — comfort her and urge her to cry it out… or distract her and encourage her to just get over it. Common lore is that it’s good for us to cry when we need to — and that’s also the conclusion of researchers at University of South Florida in a study entitled When Is Crying Cathartic?
STUDYING TEARS
The study was published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2008. I spoke with doctoral student of clinical psychology Lauren M. Bylsma, who helped analyze the findings. The researchers evaluated data on more than 5,000 male and female volunteers from 35 countries and reviewed how they felt after their last crying experience.
Bylsma’s focus was on when and under what circumstances crying became cathartic — that is, where the subject’s mood and physical well-being improved after crying. The fact that the study is international is important because it “makes the findings generalizable to different cultures,” says Bylsma. For example, people from America and Italy cry more frequently than those in China or Ghana.
The participants identified who or what was responsible for each crying episode and also provided details about who (family, friends, strangers) was present during the crying episode and described their reaction. Bylsma explained that “because so little is known about crying, we also looked into what was the response of others nearby to the crier and what caused the crying to stop.”
DOES CRYING HELP OR HURT?
Here’s what Bylsma learned from her analyses of the post-crying information…
- Seven different types of events were identified triggers for crying — conflict, loss, personal inadequacy, witnessing suffering of someone else, experiencing physical suffering, experiencing psychological suffering and positive events.
- Crying because of having witnessed other people suffering (in real life or in the news media) resulted in the lowest mood afterward. Bylsma speculated that this may be due to feelings of helplessness on the part of the crier.
- The biggest mood boost came from happy tears — for example, crying at a wedding or graduation.
- Crying about some personal inadequacy — such as being unattractive or not making enough money — delivered a post-crying boost in mood. Bylsma surmises that this may be because subjects feel they have some control over such triggers and so crying may be a way to express a desire to make a change.
- If a stranger caused the crying (say, by stealing something of yours) the subject’s mood was lower after crying.
- Social context was very important to how a person felt afterward. Crying in the presence of one supportive person improved mood… however, the opposite was true if the companion was angry, passive or embarrassed about the crying episode and/or when there was more than one person present.
- Some reasons people stopped crying included improvement of the situation or because they found a way to perceive the situation differently.
WHY DO WE CRY?
Why we cry and what happens physiologically when we cry remains something of a mystery to scientists. One theory says that crying is essentially a distress signal for help (i.e. a baby crying for food), while another sees crying as a way to reduce arousal after distress. A recent study in Emotion says we cry for both reasons. When 60 female subjects were monitored while watching a poignant movie, those who cried showed a rise in heart rate upon crying (arousal)… which then decreased as they continued to cry, as did their respiration rates (soothing).
One challenge in the study of crying is that “self-reports of crying episodes are generally retrospective,” points out Bylsma. Therefore, events that transpired afterward may affect that recollection and how a person feels about it. New research underway uses hand-held Palm Pilot computers so subjects can record crying episodes and emotions in real time.
TO AVOID A BAD CRY
Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all advice on crying, but here are some of the takeaways from the research for those who want to make their cry a “good” one…
- Choose your company. You’ll likely get more resolution and feel better if you allow yourself to cry in the presence of one supportive person. More than one person can lead to feelings of embarrassment, and you may be less likely to feel comfort from others, which can negatively impact your mood afterward. Also, if you know a particular person will not be supportive of your crying, save your tears for later.
- Don’t hold in your tears when you are facing a loss — be it of a person you love, a job or even a favorite piece of jewelry.
- Do cry. It helps clear your mood by providing a release and a way to process the feelings if you are upset with yourself.
Source(s):
Lauren M. Bylsma, MA, doctoral candidate, clinical psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida.
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Reprinted with the permission of:
Bottom Line Publications/Daily Health News
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