Your heart rate might increase, your lips start to quiver, and your voice gets shaky. Then the waterworks begin to flow. All this emotion tells your hypothalamus to produce the chemical messenger acetylcholine.
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.
Crying more than is normal for you may be a symptom of depression or a neurological disorder. If you're concerned about the amount you're crying, talk to your doctor.
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.
When you experience depression, anxiety or stress your heart rate and blood pressure rise, there's reduced blood flow to the heart and your body produces higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. Over time, these effects can lead to heart disease.
Acute emotional stress, positive or negative, can cause the left ventricle of the heart to be 'stunned' or paralysed, causing heart attack-like symptoms including strong chest, arm or shoulder pains, shortness of breath, dizziness, loss of consciousness, nausea and vomiting.
HAPPINESS/JOY + MANIA. Joy is the emotion of the heart and the small intestine, organs associated with the fire element. When we experience true joy and happiness, we are nourishing our heart and small intestine energy.
Crying also soothes us by facilitating the release of oxytocin (also called the cuddle hormone). This induces a sense of calm and well-being, helping us sleep peacefully.
Emotions and thoughts
Your heart rate increases, your breathing gets faster and blood is pumped round your body quicker. A side effect of this is that you may feel sick or dizzy as breathing too fast causes you to take in too much oxygen.
“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.
Cry all you want — you won't run out of tears
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), you make 15 to 30 gallons of tears every year. Your tears are produced by lacrimal glands located above your eyes. Tears spread across the surface of the eye when you blink.
When tears drain into the sinuses, they mix with mucus and can cause a runny nose. This buildup of mucus and tears can cause pressure in the sinuses, which may lead to a headache. A person experiencing a sinus headache may feel pain and pressure across their forehead, cheeks, or around their eyes.
During a particularly stressful experience, the anterior cingulate cortex may respond by increasing the activity of the vagus nerve—the nerve that starts in the brain stem and connects to the neck, chest and abdomen. When the vagus nerve is overstimulated, it can cause pain and nausea.
Stress from grief can flood the body with hormones, specifically cortisol, which causes that heavy-achy-feeling you get in your chest area.
Crying apparently burns as much as laughing does, at about a rate of 1.3 calories a minute.
The cyanotic spell is often a response to frustration, anger, fear, or pain. It usually occurs when the child is crying and becomes unable to draw a breath. Their skin turns bluish, especially around the lips, and they faint. They regain consciousness within a minute.
Crying and tension headaches
According to Hafeez, tension headaches are the most common type of headache from crying. “When you cry, your whole body tenses up, especially your head and neck,” she says. “As such, the muscles will constrict after a while, causing the throbbing sensation in your head to begin.”
We are most likely to cry in response to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Crying is a social trigger for empathy – a communication system that signals to others 'I need your help and support'.
Tears also promote eye health, contributing to keeping dry eye disease at bay, and flushing out potential infection risks. To summarise, the 5 reasons are: Washes out infection and debris. Hydrates the eyes.
Crying Helps Improve Your Mood
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.
Emotional information is stored through “packages” in our organs, tissues, skin, and muscles. These “packages” allow the emotional information to stay in our body parts until we can “release” it. Negative emotions in particular have a long-lasting effect on the body.
Your heart literally aches. A memory comes up that causes your stomach to clench or a chill to run down your spine. Some nights, your mind races, and your heart races along with it, your body so electrified with energy that you can barely sleep. Other nights, you're so tired that you fall asleep right away.
Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response.