Top ways crying affects your body and mind |
Top ways crying affects your body and mind
Crying may reduce stress, improve connection, affect hormones, and help the body recover after intense emotional moments
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Crying has an image problem. Public tears are usually treated as evidence that someone is overwhelmed, emotionally unstable, or losing control in a meeting that should have been an email. Wellness culture loves resilience, and crying looks messy by comparison.
Science is a little more forgiving.
According to The Healthy, crying appears to affect the body and brain in surprising ways. It may help regulate stress, strengthen emotional bonds, and shift the nervous system out of a fight-or-flight state. It can also leave people with headaches, swollen eyes, and the temporary feeling that they absolutely should not have opened up in front of coworkers.
That contradiction is part of what makes crying so interesting. Humans are the only species known to cry emotional tears, yet researchers still do not fully understand why the behavior evolved or why it can feel both relieving and exhausting at the same time.
The Healthy points to experts who describe crying as a biological reset of sorts. Emotional tears often arrive after moments of intense physiological arousal, when the body begins moving from stress mode back toward a calmer state. That may explain why people cry during grief, frustration, relief, joy, or even while watching an aggressively sentimental commercial about a rescue dog.
Crying also functions as social communication. Babies use it to get attention long before they can speak. Adults never entirely stop doing that, although the method becomes slightly more complicated with age and social expectations.
Here are five ways crying can affect your body and mind.
1. Crying may help the body calm itself down
Photo by Caleb Woods on UnsplashÂ
A good cry can feel physically draining, but researchers think that may be part of the point.
The Healthy notes crying as something that often happens after the peak of emotional stress,........