"Cry me a river" - from biology to psychology of tears

Did you know that humans are the only beings that have tears that can be emotionally triggered? As far as the evolutionary biology is concerned, we have them because they obviously served a purpose in our development. Some think that they were a signal that we were in a distress and recent studies show that you can not remain with your angry approach to someone if that someone starts crying. When a person in front of us cries, thinking processes in our brain seems to slow down and we forget about everything with focusing only on that person and the tears.

In this post, I will try to convince you that tears are not only normal from a biology standpoint but also make a point how they are extremely healthy for our psyche and overall well being. You know me, let's learn something and have some fun while we're doing it! 😎

Tears are produced by the lacrimal gland (located on the upper right from the eye, below the eyebrow) and there are 3 types of them; BASAL, REFLEX, and EMOTIONAL. If you are healthy, you have no problem with producing either one of those but there are people out there suffering from keratoconjunctivitis sicca, a condition that limits tear production. It is very inconvenient but not a serious condition if treated properly with artificial tears that contain polyvinyl alcohol, glycerin, and carboxymethylcellulose. Why those chemicals? Because they mimic natural chemicals usually found in tears.

The oily layer (produced by the meibomian gland) protects tears from evaporating or spilling out from the eye. The watery layer is in the middle of the tear and it contains water, electrolytes, glucose, and proteins. The center of the tear is the mucous layer (produced by goblet cells from the conjunctiva ) that coats the cornea and helps the tear stay on the eye. The mucins keep the tissue moisturized providing a gentle distribution of the aqueous layer over the entire eye. You can see those layers in my little graphic on the right.

Now that we know the chemistry of tears, let's see what those three types are and when do we get them.

One of the types is the REFLEX TYPE. This type serves as a protection of eyes against various irritations from smoke and wind to those nasty onions that I always hate cutting. This type is called reflex because the sensory nerves in the cornea tell the brain there is an irritation going on and the eye receives a message to produce more tears to get rid of it. The chemical composition is very similar to that one of basic type except this type contains more antibodies to fight those irritations.

From the three types, we produce one of them almost all the time, you've guessed it, it is the BASAL TYPE. These tears protect the cornea and keep our eye clean and hydrated. They contain lysozyme which protects against infection and as we grow older we produce less and less of them. On average, we produce around 1.2 ml of them every single day and they are usually drained through the nasal cavity. Hm... Time for a funny digression/story...

Ok, digression done, let's get back. The last type of tears is EMOTIONAL TYPE. These tears contain hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and Leu-enkephalin. We call those hormones the stress hormones because they are (obviously) caused by stress and when their levels become too high they become toxic and bad for our health, physical and psychological, so getting them out of our body in tears is crucial for our well being.

We know that emotional crying helps our health from the standpoint of releasing pressure and getting rid of stress hormones but according to evolutionary biologist Dr. Oren Hasson from the Tel Aviv University, the emotional benefits, and stronger relationships as results of tears are now backed up by empirical evidence.

His analysis showed how tears are actually an evolutional mechanism for bringing people closer together. By blurring our vision, tears provide information about submission. His research, in which he investigated 3 types of tears (joy, sadness, and grief ) and the sincerity of the tears, was published in the Evolutionary Psychology. Among other things, he concluded how the efficiency of crying depends on where and in front of who we cry. While crying in front of family and friends shows a need for attachment and creates bonds, it is not effective at work where emotions should remain hidden and unexpressed.

It is good to receive confirmation for something that we instinctively know or hold in our subconscious knowledge. I believe we are all quite aware of the fact that crying in front of your boss will not present us in the good light while doing it in front of people we are emotionally connected to has great benefits. On the other hand, since crying strengthens emotional bonds and you really want to form them with your boss, who am I to tell you not to? Just be sure to know that while there is a time and place for everything, suppressing your emotions never leads to anything good.

In 2011, scientists from the Weizmann Institute conducted four experiments (double-blind-study method) and got some pretty interesting findings. One of them was that sniffing woman’s tears (with or without a woman present) reduces sexual arousal in men. Well, among other things, this proves the theory that sex is most definitely not always emotionally triggered. To most people, when we see a person cry, different hormones are triggered and in most cases, the ones connected with sex are not one of them.

In the first experiment (led by Shani Gelstein, Yaara Yeshurun and their colleagues in the lab of Prof. Noam Sobel in the Weizmann Institute’s Neurobiology Department), the researches made women watch sad movies and collect their tears. Those tears were then given to men along with the saline solution to test whether they can know the difference just by smelling them. They could not. Both tears and the saline solution have no smell, they are odorless.

In the second experiment, men were first sniffing the tears or saline solution and then watching images of women's faces on a computer screen. Sniffing tears negatively affected the sex appeal attributed to the faces they were seeing and did not influence their estimates of sadness or empathy expressed in those faces. To study this further, researches made them watch sad movies after sniffing while monitoring physiological measures of arousal (skin temperature, heart rate, etc.) and asked about their self-ratings of mood. Men who were “smelling” tears showed no more empathy than those who were smelling saline solution but there was a significant dip in testosterone levels.

In the last experiment, they repeated everything that had already been done but included a fMRI machine for measuring brain activity. Scans showed that men who were sniffing tears had a significant reduction in activity levels in brain areas associated with sexual arousal.

Crying is good for you BUT ONLY IF YOU DO IT RIGHT. There are people who cry all the time and receive none of the benefits and those that seldom cry but when they do, it is an amazing healthy experience. What is going on here? Can we really cry "the wrong way"? Yes, yes we can.

If you criticize yourself while you are crying, call yourself bad names and experience a huge amount of regret then your tears are not as therapeutic as you would want them to be. When you do cry, do it because it is normal to feel sad and do not assign blame.

You do not have to rationalize this too much or wait for the perfect opportunity and a place for your tears and you do not have to put a time limit on them. Sometimes you will cry for a couple of minutes and sometimes for an hour. It all depends on what your body needs at a specific moment. The best way to benefit from any situation or previous experience is to allow ourselves pure emotion in one moment and pure rational thinking in another. Yes, you should think, criticize and evaluate your past actions, reflect on them and learn something but not while you are crying. Allow yourself to cry without judgment because your rational thinking will be clouded by your emotions and you will not come to the right conclusions anyway. Approach the problem from a rational and objective standpoint after your tears have dried.

The worst thing we could say (but often say anyway) to others or ourselves when we cry is to stop it. We use sentences like adults don't cry, be strong, this is not a big thing and undermind our emotional state. Try using more encouraging sayings next time like let it all out or I am here for you. Every crying will eventually stop naturally and when it does, we will feel better and "lighter".

Being happy is the true meaning of life and we should always aim for good feelings but not at the expense of ignoring the bad ones. You can not be good if you do not acknowledge that you are sometimes bad. You can not move forward if you do not know where you currently are. Every emotion we experience has its purpose and a certain value. There are no "bad" and "right" emotions, all are beneficial to our wellbeing. Learn from your feelings, they have a lot to teach you and always remember: