“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.
A dear friend of mine whom I recently lost spent most of his life near the Severn River in Maryland. The Severn is technically a “tidal estuary”—a brackish inlet off the Chesapeake Bay, where salt water mixes with fresh. “It’s the most human river,” my friend once told me. “It has the precise salinity of human tears.”
Whether or not the Severn is one, a river of pure tears sounds like a scene out of a Greek tragedy. But to my friend, it was a mystical and beautiful juxtaposition—that a signature of sorrow would accompany the splendor of nature. Crying, too, is a contradiction. It can accompany the most profound grief or the deepest joy. It can be a response to anger and frustration or to poetry too lovely for words.
As such, crying is often thought of as an expression of wild emotion. But this is yet another contradiction: In fact, crying can be a powerful tool to tame our feelings, to maintain a deep equanimity in our emotional life. It can bring balance, peace—and, just maybe, even a touch of the divine.
Crying is very common, and quintessentially human. Although many species call out in distress to signal a need for help, only humans weep, with tears, for emotional reasons and not because of ocular irritation. As the Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets has chronicled in his research, two negative crying triggers are extremely consistent across populations and cultures: helplessness and loss.
Occasionally, though, we weep for joy. Scholars find it perplexing, because it seems counterintuitive that we would respond to overwhelmingly positive emotions with a negative expression. New research conducted in several countries found that happy crying tended to occur during four occasions: times of extraordinary affection, such as weddings (55 percent of positive crying, on average); moments of unusual achievement, such as winning an award (29 percent); awe in the face of beauty, such as exquisite music (8 percent); and intense amusement (3 percent). Classifying it, though, doesn’t make it seem any more logical.
There may, in fact, be a deeper connection between happy crying and sad crying: They are both a response to emotional extremes, which suggests that tears help bring us back to equilibrium. Overwhelming negative emotion is important—even lifesaving—in a crisis like being separated from loved ones or being under threat; it creates the impulse to act with force or immediacy. But staying in this state isn’t helpful beyond the immediate crisis (nor is it pleasant), so we seek to reduce stress and improve our mood—which crying can do quite effectively. Some researchers argue that we also need to reset emotionally when things are just too wonderful. Overwhelming joy feels great, but it distracts us from the business of life. And ongoing rapture would be exhausting.
The exact mechanism for how crying keeps extreme emotions in check has not been definitively established. Some researchers have posited that there’s literal truth to the Jewish proverb “What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.” In his book Crying: The Mystery of Tears, the biochemist William H. Frey hypothesized that we eliminate stress hormones such as cortisol through tears. Another, less widely accepted theory is that tears clear blood of certain toxins or unwanted chemicals.
Emotional balance is good for well-being: Though strong feelings are inevitable, having excessive and persistent emotional highs and lows is clearly not associated with good mental health. People who experience dysregulated emotions—positive and negative—are sometimes said to have “cyclothymic disorder,” a mood disorder that lowers quality of life.
Crying is not a cure-all, of course. Weeping involuntarily—for example, at work—can lead to embarrassment, which is unlikely to make you happier. This is especially true for men (probably due to stigma) and people high in conscientiousness (who dislike burdening others).
In such a situation, you might seek to avoid feelings of shame by preventing crying; folk cures include pushing your tongue into the roof of your mouth, trying to relax your face, and pinching yourself. Better yet, you might avoid the pinches and still get the emotional release of crying by surrounding yourself with people who won’t think less of you for shedding a few tears. Or, if possible, consider finding a job that doesn’t drive you to weeping.
Evolutionary biology sheds light on the scientific mystery of human tears. But there remains a deeper mystery in crying; otherwise, my friend’s observation about the Severn would be about as lyrical as saying it was a river of sneezes.
Crying is central to religious iconography, to mythology, to profound transcendental experiences. For example, the shortest verse in most English translations of the Christian Bible is “Jesus wept,” describing his response when his close friend Lazarus died. The point here does not seem like Jesus was trying to restore his emotional equilibrium.
Usually, the verse is seen as a sign of God’s solidarity with humanity, like the touch of the fingertips of God and man on the ceiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: Just we were made in God’s image; he fashions himself in ours, coming to Earth to experience both our joys and our sorrows. The quintessentially human experience of crying may be our most divine one as well.
