The downsides of crying The physical downsides of crying are pretty straightforward: puffy eyes, splotchy skin and a headachy feeling that can be chalked up to the strong contractions of your facial muscles while you weep and pressure in your sinuses from the runny nose that accompanies a tear-fest.
Bad Effects of Crying on Health
It can lead to fits or can cause acute shortness of breath. For those with severe heart conditions, there can be a cardiac pain. Crying can take a toll on your body if you have certain medical conditions. For most people crying does more good for their body than harm.
Many people associate crying with feeling sad and making them feel worse, but in reality, crying can help improve your mood - emotional tears release stress hormones. Your stress level lowers when you cry, which can help you sleep better and strengthen your immune system.
Crying in response to emotions such as sadness, joy, or frustration is normal and has a number of health benefits. However, sometimes frequent crying can be a sign of depression. People may be depressed if their crying: happens very frequently.
How Much Crying Is Too Much? No guidelines exist that determine how much people should or should not cry. Studies indicate that women tend to shed more emotional tears than men. One study found that women cried an average of 5.3 times per month while men cried 1.4 times during the same period.
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).
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.
Crying is not a bad thing. In fact, it's how your body releases pent-up energy after a traumatic or distressing event. During your recovery period, let yourself feel your emotions. After crying, you may feel like a weight's been lifted off your shoulders.
Today's psychological thought largely concurs, emphasizing the role of crying as a mechanism that allows us to release stress and emotional pain. Crying is an important safety valve, largely because keeping difficult feelings inside — what psychologists call repressive coping — can be bad for our health.
These chemicals boost your heart rate and blood pressure, so if you hold them in while trying not to cry, it can translate into chest tightness and heavy breathing. "Suppressing an emotion (in this case, frustration or sadness) actually heightens it and makes you feel worse," says psychologist Nikki Martinez, Psy. D.
Crying is a normal emotional response to many different factors. However, frequent, uncontrollable, or unexplained crying can be emotionally and physically exhausting and can greatly affect daily life. This type of crying may result from a mental health condition, such as burnout, anxiety, or depression.
Definitions of crybaby. a person given to excessive complaints and crying and whining. synonyms: bellyacher, complainer, grumbler, moaner, sniveller, squawker, whiner. types: kvetch.
We also create a lot of mucous when we cry — snot, tears, and generally blubbering. All of this mucous could leave you feeling congested or having a headache. Plus, the muscle strain we exert when we cry can be enough to cause a tension headache.
“Crying releases a ton of hormones, including chemical endorphins (painkillers) and oxytocin, also known as the 'love hormone'. These induce a sense of calm and promote sleepiness,” explains Rhodes.
It may not seem as physically exhausting as say, leg day, but crying is pretty draining, says Lauren Bylsma, PhD and professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. "Crying is hard on the body," she explains to Men's Health. "It takes a lot of energy and is something that takes over your whole body."
This can include burning eyes, dry mouth, runny nose and headache after crying. These things are all perfectly normal, so while you might feel better emotionally, you are probably going to be aching a bit physically. Here's why so many of these things happen, and what you can do to feel better fast.
“When you cry, you tighten up your forehead and also the neck and back of the head,” Newman says. Someone experiencing a long, hard cry will prolong the constriction of these muscles, therefore giving you a big, bad head throb. Long bouts of crying can also affect your sinuses, says Newman.
Indirectly, yes, stress can cause petechiae to form under the eyes. This is because so many people cry when they feel stressed. The harder you cry and the puffier your eyes get from crying, the more likely red dots will form. Elevated blood pressure, which is a symptom of stress, also causes red spots.
Anxiety that occurs in the higher degrees can cause even stronger emotional reactions. These strong emotional reactions can cause some people to cry. Moreover, some people cry even after an anxiety or panic attack has ended due to the after effects of experiencing such strong episodes of anxiety.
Crying is an important coping mechanism, psychologists say. It allows us to express difficult emotions. It may help reduce stress by activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which controls the body's ability to relax. And, perhaps most important, it allows us to solicit emotional support and bond.