Why crying isn't sexy and may not help you feel better

There is the notion that is very popular today, and this is that it is valuable to just let it all out.

That it’s bad to keep emotion inside, bottled up, or it is thought to do damage.

But is this really true?

In this newsletter, I’m going to show you two studies about crying that are extremely fascinating, especially to men.

I’m in a show you that crying doesn’t help, and that crying isn’t sexy.

So let’s first talk about crying, and we can’t really talk about crying unless we talk about women.

I’m sorry, but more women cry than men, and this study only studied women, but it’s a study of 1004 crying episodes with about 100 women participants.

What if it was true that crying does not make a person feel better?

In fact, the role of crying seems to be to enlist others in support of you.

When crying was done in the presence of others, and these other people consoled the person crying, she felt better.

But crying only made about one third of the people feel better afterwards.

Crying doesn’t actually make you feel better.

Crying actually may make you feel worse. That was the study conclusion.

But if you’re going to cry, cry intensely, because…

those who cried with greater intensity (but not duration) were more likely to experience mood benefits from crying.

Another huge find is that when people cried about something they had no control over, they felt worse.

For example, if someone cried about the suffering of a friend or a family member, they did not feel better after their crying.

But if a person cried about something that they did wrong, or a result they brought about by accident or because of their own weaknesses, when they cried they felt a lot better afterwards.

They felt they had some control over what they were crying about, and that made them feel better after the crying episode.

In this diagram, the researcher puts the positive crying episodes near the top, in green, and the negative episodes in blue at the bottom of each box.

You can see how crying episodes that result from a personal defect or improvable situation resulted in mood improvement, but how crying due to something unchangeable or outside the person resulted in mood worsening.

Now let’s talk about how crying isn’t sexy.

In this study they found out that something in a woman’s tears (and sorry ladies, but you cry more than men and the studies focus on women, not men) makes a man less interested in the woman sexually, unless aroused.

So they did a great job here.

First, they determine that even though tears have no odor, there is chemicals in tears that men pick up on even at a distance.

They had men sniff these tears of emotion-laden negative crying women, and they observed the man’s sexual arousal, including using MRI brain imaging.

merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears
obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal
Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual
arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone.

So if you are a lady who is reading this, you may want to keep in mind that crying is not sexy.

And if you’re a man, and your wife or girlfriend is crying, keep in mind that there is a physiological situation going on here that will lower your testosterone and make you less sexually interested.

Just knowing that can make things go a lot better.

Citations

When and for whom does crying improve mood? A daily diary study
of 1004 crying episodes
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lauren_Bylsma/publication/242330710_When_and_for_whom_does_crying_improve_mood_A_daily_diary_study_of_1004_crying_episodes/links/55ce095c08ae502646a6f968.pdf

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/226
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/226.full.html

Click for more information on Crying, for information on Mental Health, or for more on how Crying reduces Sexual desires.