Studies have found that crying can lower blood pressure and heart rate. This effect was seen on people who had gone through intense therapy sessions during which they they had cried a lot.
Crying can lower both your blood pressure and heart rate, studies have found. It does this by activating your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which helps you relax.
They cause your heart to beat more rapidly and your blood vessels to narrow to help push blood to the center of the body. The hormones also increase your blood pressure and blood sugar levels.
Traumatic emotional stressor can be enough to cause physical damage to the heart, a syndrome known variously as takotsubo cardiomyopathy, stress-induced cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome.”
Shortness of breath with activity or when lying down. Fatigue and weakness. Swelling in the legs, ankles and feet. Rapid or irregular heartbeat.
Not all tears are created equal
It's the third category, emotional tears (which flush stress hormones and other toxins out of our system), that potentially offers the most health benefits. Researchers have established that crying releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins.
Crying is normal in healthy amounts—but what is a healthy amount? With no hard numbers as to how often we should cry, the American Psychological Association states that, on average, women cry emotional tears several times a month (30 to 64 times a year), while men may cry once every month or two (5 to 17 times a year).
Research has found that in addition to being self-soothing, shedding emotional tears releases oxytocin and endorphins. These chemicals make people feel good and may also ease both physical and emotional pain. In this way, crying can help reduce pain and promote a sense of well-being.
Sadness may flood your body with hormones like cortisol. Excess stress hormones in the body can cause physical sensations in your heart and nervous system, like chest pain, itching, or a rapid heart rate.
It's best not to hold in emotions all the time, but sometimes it's important to hold back tears. If you need to control a cry, try to hold back your tears just until you're in a better place for them. This way you won't suppress your emotions altogether.
When someone cries, their heart rate increases and their breathing slows down. The more vigorous the crying, the greater the hyperventilation, which reduces the amount of oxygen the brain receives — leading to an overall state of drowsiness.
So, having a good cry from time to time can reduce stress and be good for you in many ways. And that stress reduction can help reduce anxiety disorder symptoms and anxiety disorder recovery. However, crying too much can be unhealthy for you and interfere with anxiety disorder recovery.
In the short term, it can cause pesky problems such as irritability, anxiety, and poor sleep. But over time, repressing your tears can lead to cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension — or even cancer.
Treatment for trauma
By concentrating on what's happening in your body, you can release pent-up trauma-related energy through shaking, crying, and other forms of physical release.
Hippocrates thought that crying was the body's way to safely release “excess humors” from the brain. Aristotle suggested that tears cleanse the mind of suppressed emotions. The poet, Ovid, agreed with Aristotle, saying that, “It is some relief to weep; grief is satisfied and carried off by tears.”
So, tears are not considered as an excretion.
/ˈkrɑɪbeɪbi/ Other forms: crybabies. A crybaby is someone who cries very easily and complains a lot. If you have a younger sister, you've probably called her a crybaby from time to time.
As we get older, the cognitive area of the brain takes over and dictates behavior via reasoning, and we recognize that physical pain is self-limiting, finite, and predictable. We also learn to differentiate corporeal pain from psychological and emotional distress, or what scientists call social pain.
If you laugh or cry uncontrollably, suddenly and frequently—even when you're not feeling emotional, this may be a symptom of a condition called PseudoBulbar Affect (PBA), which may be a sign of a neurologic condition or traumatic brain injury.