May 27, 2009 • 20 mins
One study reports that women cry roughly four times as often as men, and historically women are often depicted as more prone to weeping -- but why? Learn more about crying in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom? Never told you?
From house to works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. Today,
(00:20):
I want to start off with a troubling statistic. It's
troubling to me at least. Okay, the statistic I want
to bring to your attention is that women cry roughly
four times as men. According to a biochemist who has
studied crying. That seems pretty high, Molly, seems high. It
makes us sound like gigantic cry baby cry babies. Well, um,
you know, women crying has been sort of a big
(00:43):
news story in the past six or eight months. One
famous example that happened earlier this fall during the Democratic primary,
was when Hillary Clinton now famously cried um on a
campaign stop before the New Hampshire primary. And there is
so much media buzz just about the fact that she
(01:05):
didn't even really cry. There weren't really visible tears, as
I remember, because of course I watched it along with
everybody else. I watched over and over again. Um, there
weren't really visible tears. She wasn't boo hoong. She just
her voice kind of cracked a little bit and you
could tell that she was sort of um welling up,
tearing up. And yet it was the hugest news story
(01:27):
for that week. Oh of course, just and you know,
people are analyzing how much this affected her win in
that primary. Did that bring out women who identified with her?
It was very newsworthy and Obama supporters were, you know,
questioning whether or not she was faking the tears, whether
she was sort of manipulating the votes by painting herself
as a more approachable, emotional average woman. And here's another
(01:50):
example before we get into crying in general, but this
one was really troubling to me. I don't know if
you remember. This also happened last year on her television show,
and this was pretty famous as well. Ellen did generous
cried because of a dog snap who she'd adopted. This dog.
It didn't work. She gave it to another family, which
was against the rules. So the you know, the people
she'd adopted the dog from, came into the dog away.
(02:12):
So she just cried and cried on her show about
about this dog. And this is what UM television host
Bill Maher said about that on his show. According to
the Associated Press, he said, Uh, if I was a woman,
I would be embarrassed right now. I would be embarrassed
for all womankind. Wow, that was his response to the
woman crying. So, I think the question we have to
(02:33):
answer is our women big cry babies? Why do women
cry more than men four times as much? Because crying,
you know, it's sort of a twofold thing because we
hear about we refer to a good cry as something
that can be healthy and cathartic. But on the other hand,
especially for women, crying in public can also, like you said,
make us look like big, wimpy cry babies. So is
(02:55):
this really some kind of emotional hang up that women
have more than men or is it biology? And you know, interestingly,
and the how crying works article that's on our site,
it actually might have started off as just a psychosocial thing.
Basically the first time when they started cremating people back
in the olden days, the ashes would get in people's
(03:15):
eyes and cause their eyes de wellap And because it
always happened around death, you know, people started associating crying
with lots of emotion, lost pain, things of that sort.
And there are actually three types of tears that um
that we cry. We don't just cry, you know, it's
sappy movies and at funerals. We also are Our body
(03:37):
also naturally produces tears to protect our eyes and keep
them from drying out. So the first type of tears
just sees very basic tears are called basil tears, and
those are the ones that you produce five to ten
ounces of basil tears every day, and these are the
tears that keep your eyes from drying out right, But
they don't they don't have to leave your eyes every day,
(03:58):
basically drained through the name easil cavity. So if you do,
if you are crying from your eyes and then you
get a runny nose, the runny nose is not your
emotional crying. It's like the basil tears just sort of
releasing and you have so many tears they just released
out the nose, right. And then a second type of
tier are reflex tears, and reflex tears are the ones
that protect your eye from irritants like when um, if
(04:21):
you are standing in a bonfire and the wind shifts
and the smoke blows in your eyes, you start blinking
a lot and might tear up because your your eyes
are producing the tears to protect your eyes from the
irritants in the smoke, right. And what I found interesting
about these tears is they are connected to the brain.
I mean, maybe this is obvious to everyone but me,
but basically, it's your brain stem that is sending hormones
(04:43):
to glance in your eyelets and saying, you know, pain, pain,
release this pain from the body. And so it's very
connected to the brain, which brings us into the next
type of tear, which is the emotional tear that we
all think of when we think about crying. That's connected
to the cerebrum in the brain, and so that's where
you're that's where your brain registers that you're sad basically,
so it's the sad part of your brain releasing the
(05:06):
hormones that tell you to cry. And let's talk a
little bit about what exactly a tear is. Um. You know,
it looks like just a watery substance. We know that
they're kind of salty. Um tears are made up of protein, water, mucus,
and oil, and they're yummy and delicious and they're released
(05:27):
from the lackmal gland in the upper outer region of
your eye. But the chemical makeup of these tears is
gonna change once you experience emotional crying. Right, if you're
just crying because of you know, the onion or whatever,
you're just releasing water basically, right the water. But as
soon as you start crying for an emotional reason. The
(05:48):
most common cry. Causes of emotional crying are basically just
low level stress for frustration and watching something sad on television.
So let's say you're watching something sad on television. Beaches Beaches.
It's mentioned several times and basically every article about crying
that I could find, maybe I should watch it if
I need a good cry. But is there a good cry?
(06:10):
We'll get back to that. So as soon as you
start watching something sad or you just have a bad
day and you just need to cry, all of a sudden,
chemicals are starting again into the to the mix and
our favorite thing, what is it, Kristen Hormon, Hormons are
in your tears? Uh. First, is a protein called prolactin, which,
as you might guess from the name, is also associated
(06:31):
with breast milk production. So the same breast milk producing
hormone is also in your tear, also a protein. I'm
not going to say this right, you can, Molly, thanks,
Kristen Adrino Corte co tropic. I mean, basically, there's a
hormone in there, and what this hormone was doing, um,
it's it's also it's associated with high stress levels. So basically, um,
(06:53):
you know, watching something sad kind of stresses you out
because you might be imagining it happening in your own life,
and so that hormone is going into overdrive. And then
finally we have an endorphin which, uh it's name has
a lot of vowels and I'm really just not going
to attempt to, uh to butcher it. So this endorphin
reduces pain and works to improve your mood. So tears,
(07:16):
emotional tears are pretty complex. Yeah. I mean there's a
lot of different sort of emotions that are being fed
into your tears, and the release of them is either
releasing stress or reducing pain, which I found really interesting.
So that's why people do say you can have a
good cry. You're basically releasing toxins from your body. So
when in that study that you mentioned first about women
(07:37):
crying four times more than men. That was referring to
emotional tears. Correct, Yes, So let's talk a little bit
about why men and women UM have these gender differences
with specifically emotional tears. Those very hormonal. But you know, Christen,
there's not always a huge difference in emotional tears. I
mean from the time we're born as babies and then
(07:59):
through rudy, boys and girls are crying at equal rates. Right,
All babies cry because they need to have their most
basic needs fulfilled. They obviously cannot talk, they can't communicate
to their mother in any other way that they need
be fed or changed or whatever, except by crying. Then
something interesting happens. At the age of ten months. Babies
(08:21):
start to exhibit something called manipulative crying. And this is
when they start crying because they want something more than
just you know, food and diaper change. They maybe wants
more attention or toys, toys and molly. This this was
this was a little astounding to me. Some studies have
(08:41):
reported women in particular UM carry on that manipulative crying
behavior throughout life more so than men, just to be
able to give them what they want. So you have
the stereotypical girl who gets pulled over for a speeding
ticket and immediately the waterworks start. And we have an
example of manipula of crying. So you're saying that from
(09:01):
ten months I knew that I could cry just to
get out of an argument if I wanted to. Well,
I'm not saying that, Molly, the research is saying that.
But what a ten month old genius? I was um
And then, like you said, boys and girls do cry
equal amounts until they hit puberty. And then what do
you know, hormones, hormones come into play, and as the
(09:24):
level of testosterone and boys rises, their levels of their
frequency of crying decreases, and the opposite happens to girls
while um estrogen rises and crying goes up as well. Right,
And as we mentioned before, one of the main hormones
that's going on in your tear is pro lactint, which
is the breastfeeding hormone basically. And so of course, when
(09:45):
are going to have much more of this in their body,
even if they're not having babies at the time they
have I think it. Let's see, they have six secret
sent more prolactin in their bodies. That's a lot. That's
that's sort of ridiculous. Of course we cry more, and
so basically they're just saying that routine is always running
in our in our systems, and that's why we're gonna cry.
And do you know how many times, according to one study,
(10:07):
a woman cried in a year, Christen, give it to
me sixty four sixty four times. That's basically a sixth
of your year every day you're crying. I think that's
over blown. Well, what's interesting is the beginning of that study. Uh,
they were supposed to estimate how many times they think
they would cry in here. Everyone undershot it, and then
(10:27):
it ended up being sixty four compared to men who
only cried seventeen year, seventeen times each year. That sounds
about more like it. You know, Well, maybe maybe you
don't have enough prolactin in your body. Well, going back
to this whole whole hormonal explanation for why women cry
more than then, once women and men hit middle age
and menopause kicks in, the gender difference between crying sort
(10:52):
of levels off, doesn't it. Yeah, Basically, as soon as
you know the prolactin isn't running through our bodies, it does.
It does, even out and men might even cry a
little bit more. Are But um, one reason why men
might cry less according to theories, I mean, it's all,
it's all speculative at this point, is that men may
sweat more than women on average. So they're sweating out there.
(11:12):
They're sweating, sad these negative hormones, Yeah, give sweat into
the oldies a whole new, whole new meaning to me.
So we have men's sweating more. We're sweating all their tears.
And also, Molly, men's tear glands, those lacrymal glands are
smaller in men than women. So it might be also
that men simply cannot physically produce as many tears as
(11:36):
we can. Size matters, Yes, it does so basically. Yeah,
I mean with our bigger tear glands, we can produce
more quantity more all the time. We've just got these
mega glands working for us, tears, mega hormones. But Molly,
we might women might have a little bit of a
health advantage since we tend to cry more than men.
(12:00):
Some research has shown that really letting those emotional tears
out can actually lower your risk of heart disease and hypertension,
and also people suffering from conditions like colitis and ulcers
tend to have a less positive attitude about crying than
their healthier counterparts, which seems to indicate a correlation between
(12:21):
you know, your health and whether or not you're crying.
If you're holding in all these tears, all this tension,
it's building up, and it's actually causing health problems, contributing
to health problems. Right. But then on the other side,
sometime that's worrying is that, you know, we know that
women are are diagnosed more often with depression, and crying
is often seen as a symptom of depression as opposed
to something that we may just be doing biologically exactly.
(12:44):
So we sort of have this conundrum of you know,
tears being good and bad physically. What about crying in
let's say the workplace, Oh, christ and it is always
bad to cry in the workplace. Suicide, right, suicide? I mean,
you know, Ellen cried in the workplace. She got blasted
by Bill maher, Hillary cried on the workplace. CNN had
(13:06):
a field day with it. She did win an election,
one election, she won. She won the battle, but not
the war. Yeah, that's true. But um, even on The Apprentice,
the one that was hosted by Martha Stewart. When a
contestant cried, Martha told her women in business do not cry.
Just as there's no crying in baseball, there's no crying
in the workplace. That's right. Um, And this is this
(13:27):
might be kind of hard because women really are more
inclined than men to feel the urge to cry when
they're frustrated. So these smaller frustrations at work, maybe being
late or botching and presentation or just those kind of
small irritants that can build up and get under your
skin will make us want to cry more than men.
But Molly, it might also be because women, socially or not,
(13:49):
um as free to express their anger outwardly. If that
makes sense. Oh, I think so. Like let's say you
asked for a raise it was and I like, you know,
a guy might just go out and throw a stapler,
pound his fists. Yeah. And and then the woman, if
she does that, she is an emotional time um, ticking
(14:09):
away before she was carried away to a straight check.
Right and uh. In this article about women crying in
the workplace from the New York Times, Uh cites a
psychology professor at Yale University who says that if women
could act out like men, there would probably be less tears.
And one book on crying called Crying The Natural and
(14:30):
Cultural History of Tears UM traces this workplace repression of
tears and then back to the Industrial Revolution when managers
would train these male workers to be calm and rational
while you know, the women were still working at home, right,
so they weren't They didn't get this sort of on
the job training about tears. All they know is they
showed up and they could not cry, right, And in
(14:52):
Western culture, there's definitely a stigma of you know, men
being more stoic and not crying so they don't weakness. Right. Basically,
if you do cry, you're showing weakness and you're showing
that you're less um, I guess capable to take on
these small irritants every day. Um. You know, especially if
a woman's in a in a leadership position, if she's
the boss. Uh, you know, I think there'd be a
(15:14):
lot of pressure to not cry, to not lose that composure,
even though you know, like we said that it might
just be sort of a biological response to things that
are going on your body exactly. And speaking of women
in leadership, crying um. One study from Pennsylvania State University
found that men's tears are viewed more positively than women. So, say,
(15:35):
if something stressful is going on in the workplace and
your boss who breaks down a little bit into meeting,
your male boss, I should say, breaks down a little
bit in the meeting, it might be a sign that oh,
he's you know, you see human side of women. He's
just you know, he's a little more sensitive than you
thought he was. Whereas if that was a female boss,
you would tell her to grab her hanky and go home, right,
(15:55):
And it's it definitely. I think people evaluate the cause
of the tear. They'll look at you sort of the
degree of situation, which maybe why something like crying over
a dog on television was really pooh pooed. But if
you cry, like, let's say, over you know, a major
national tragedy that we seem as very dignified, very um
you know, in touch with emotions, et cetera. Right, But okay,
(16:16):
so we know you can't cry in the workplace, but
I can admit every now and then it happens. So
what are we gonna do about it? Let's give people
some tips. If you're in your office, you need to cry,
What should you do? First of all, just keep in
mind that workplace is not the place to cry. You
gotta get out of the office. If if you can't
hold it back and you're not in a meeting or
anything like that and you can step out, do so.
(16:39):
Don't go to the bathroom, right, that is the place
where people normally go to cry. Do not do it
because someone is going to see you, right, and then
that's just gonna lead to goss about you being some
weepy worker. Right, You need to take a walk, go
sit in your car if you have to listen to
some feel good tunes, but in brief, breathe, get away
from the office. And if you aren't a meeting and
(16:59):
you feel a starting to well up inside of you,
don't try and hold your breath because then if you
release it, it might kind of sound like a sob.
So you need to keep breathing deeply, breathing regularly. And
you know, there are all sorts of things you might do,
like pinch your cheek, pinch your leg um, you know,
kind of you know, things like they're coping mechanisms. They're
probably gonna be different for everyone to kind of experiment.
(17:20):
In worst case scenario, you're in a meeting with your boss,
you freak out, you start crying. If that happens, you
got to go to your boss and talk to him
or her afterwards to just let let them know that, Hey, sorry,
I freaked out. This is not normally me and control
of the situation. Yeah, acknowledge the fact that you cried.
(17:41):
Get it out of the way, and acknowledge that you know,
clearly we were talking about a situation where I feel
very passionate. I think you can kind of spin it
into a positive like, you know, I feel very strongly
about this project I was assigned about the reasons I
deserve a raise, etcetera, etcetera. But here's the one thing
you do not do. Yeah, this is this is important,
and this is something that I think everyone one's done
once in a while. To blame it on hormones in
(18:04):
your period. Do not say, oh, I'm sorry, she's having
my period, because while that sounds like an easy excuse,
it does not help your working sisters, right. It does
not reflect well on you as a professional. You got
a suprofessional, Yeah, Kristen, Big girls don't cry dot dot
dot in the workplace. But I don't want to sound
too down on tears. I mean, when we started, we
(18:24):
were talking about how tears are sort of a biological
response to hormones you've got to get out of your body.
There is a reason why we refer to crying sometimes
as a good cry. It can have very positive health results,
like we mentioned before, and also just um positive psychological effects. Uh.
There was a study that came out in December two
thousand and eight from the Journal of Social and Clinical
(18:46):
Psychology about um whether or not crying actually is cathartic,
whether that emotional release really is a positive thing. And
of course it found mixed results that depended completely on
when and where you cry. So let's say you are
upset in the workplace, you run into the bathroom, you're sobbing,
your boss walks and sees you crying, It's probably not
(19:07):
going to be a very cathartic positive experience. Uh. The
results of the study found that if an order for
a cry to be a positive experience, it needs to
have UM three elements. You need to have social support
surrounding this. If you are crying in front of somebody,
it needs to be someone who is encouraging you and
you know, coaching you through things, saying it's gonna be okay.
(19:28):
Then second, there needs to be some kind of resolution
to whatever made you cry in the first place. If
it was like, um, you know, stressful job presentation, go back,
think about what you did, think about how you could,
you know, maybe do better the next time, and then
have a new understanding of whatever made you cry as well.
So kind of have to come full circle with the
(19:49):
whole crying experience in order for an emotional cry to
really be an honest cleansing experience. Wow, that was really impressive, Kristen.
Kind of makes me want to go home and watch
Beaches with you. Yeah, I could. I could use it
cry now all right, so while we um go have
a good cry, cry it out, Cry it out, And
(20:10):
if you want to tell us your crying story or
just have any other questions or comments about the podcast,
you can email us at mom Stuff at how stuff
works dot com. And if you have more questions about crying,
check out how Crying Works via Leah Hoyt on how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com.
(20:33):
Want more, How stuff Works. Check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
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are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom? Never told you?
From house to works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. Today,
(00:20):
I want to start off with a troubling statistic. It's
troubling to me at least. Okay, the statistic I want
to bring to your attention is that women cry roughly
four times as men. According to a biochemist who has
studied crying. That seems pretty high, Molly, seems high. It
makes us sound like gigantic cry baby cry babies. Well, um,
you know, women crying has been sort of a big
(00:43):
news story in the past six or eight months. One
famous example that happened earlier this fall during the Democratic primary,
was when Hillary Clinton now famously cried um on a
campaign stop before the New Hampshire primary. And there is
so much media buzz just about the fact that she
(01:05):
didn't even really cry. There weren't really visible tears, as
I remember, because of course I watched it along with
everybody else. I watched over and over again. Um, there
weren't really visible tears. She wasn't boo hoong. She just
her voice kind of cracked a little bit and you
could tell that she was sort of um welling up,
tearing up. And yet it was the hugest news story
(01:27):
for that week. Oh of course, just and you know,
people are analyzing how much this affected her win in
that primary. Did that bring out women who identified with her?
It was very newsworthy and Obama supporters were, you know,
questioning whether or not she was faking the tears, whether
she was sort of manipulating the votes by painting herself
as a more approachable, emotional average woman. And here's another
(01:50):
example before we get into crying in general, but this
one was really troubling to me. I don't know if
you remember. This also happened last year on her television show,
and this was pretty famous as well. Ellen did generous
cried because of a dog snap who she'd adopted. This dog.
It didn't work. She gave it to another family, which
was against the rules. So the you know, the people
she'd adopted the dog from, came into the dog away.
(02:12):
So she just cried and cried on her show about
about this dog. And this is what UM television host
Bill Maher said about that on his show. According to
the Associated Press, he said, Uh, if I was a woman,
I would be embarrassed right now. I would be embarrassed
for all womankind. Wow, that was his response to the
woman crying. So, I think the question we have to
(02:33):
answer is our women big cry babies? Why do women
cry more than men four times as much? Because crying,
you know, it's sort of a twofold thing because we
hear about we refer to a good cry as something
that can be healthy and cathartic. But on the other hand,
especially for women, crying in public can also, like you said,
make us look like big, wimpy cry babies. So is
(02:55):
this really some kind of emotional hang up that women
have more than men or is it biology? And you know, interestingly,
and the how crying works article that's on our site,
it actually might have started off as just a psychosocial thing.
Basically the first time when they started cremating people back
in the olden days, the ashes would get in people's
(03:15):
eyes and cause their eyes de wellap And because it
always happened around death, you know, people started associating crying
with lots of emotion, lost pain, things of that sort.
And there are actually three types of tears that um
that we cry. We don't just cry, you know, it's
sappy movies and at funerals. We also are Our body
(03:37):
also naturally produces tears to protect our eyes and keep
them from drying out. So the first type of tears
just sees very basic tears are called basil tears, and
those are the ones that you produce five to ten
ounces of basil tears every day, and these are the
tears that keep your eyes from drying out right, But
they don't they don't have to leave your eyes every day,
(03:58):
basically drained through the name easil cavity. So if you do,
if you are crying from your eyes and then you
get a runny nose, the runny nose is not your
emotional crying. It's like the basil tears just sort of
releasing and you have so many tears they just released
out the nose, right. And then a second type of
tier are reflex tears, and reflex tears are the ones
that protect your eye from irritants like when um, if
(04:21):
you are standing in a bonfire and the wind shifts
and the smoke blows in your eyes, you start blinking
a lot and might tear up because your your eyes
are producing the tears to protect your eyes from the
irritants in the smoke, right. And what I found interesting
about these tears is they are connected to the brain.
I mean, maybe this is obvious to everyone but me,
but basically, it's your brain stem that is sending hormones
(04:43):
to glance in your eyelets and saying, you know, pain, pain,
release this pain from the body. And so it's very
connected to the brain, which brings us into the next
type of tear, which is the emotional tear that we
all think of when we think about crying. That's connected
to the cerebrum in the brain, and so that's where
you're that's where your brain registers that you're sad basically,
so it's the sad part of your brain releasing the
(05:06):
hormones that tell you to cry. And let's talk a
little bit about what exactly a tear is. Um. You know,
it looks like just a watery substance. We know that
they're kind of salty. Um tears are made up of protein, water, mucus,
and oil, and they're yummy and delicious and they're released
(05:27):
from the lackmal gland in the upper outer region of
your eye. But the chemical makeup of these tears is
gonna change once you experience emotional crying. Right, if you're
just crying because of you know, the onion or whatever,
you're just releasing water basically, right the water. But as
soon as you start crying for an emotional reason. The
(05:48):
most common cry. Causes of emotional crying are basically just
low level stress for frustration and watching something sad on television.
So let's say you're watching something sad on television. Beaches Beaches.
It's mentioned several times and basically every article about crying
that I could find, maybe I should watch it if
I need a good cry. But is there a good cry?
(06:10):
We'll get back to that. So as soon as you
start watching something sad or you just have a bad
day and you just need to cry, all of a sudden,
chemicals are starting again into the to the mix and
our favorite thing, what is it, Kristen Hormon, Hormons are
in your tears? Uh. First, is a protein called prolactin, which,
as you might guess from the name, is also associated
(06:31):
with breast milk production. So the same breast milk producing
hormone is also in your tear, also a protein. I'm
not going to say this right, you can, Molly, thanks,
Kristen Adrino Corte co tropic. I mean, basically, there's a
hormone in there, and what this hormone was doing, um,
it's it's also it's associated with high stress levels. So basically, um,
(06:53):
you know, watching something sad kind of stresses you out
because you might be imagining it happening in your own life,
and so that hormone is going into overdrive. And then
finally we have an endorphin which, uh it's name has
a lot of vowels and I'm really just not going
to attempt to, uh to butcher it. So this endorphin
reduces pain and works to improve your mood. So tears,
(07:16):
emotional tears are pretty complex. Yeah. I mean there's a
lot of different sort of emotions that are being fed
into your tears, and the release of them is either
releasing stress or reducing pain, which I found really interesting.
So that's why people do say you can have a
good cry. You're basically releasing toxins from your body. So
when in that study that you mentioned first about women
(07:37):
crying four times more than men. That was referring to
emotional tears. Correct, Yes, So let's talk a little bit
about why men and women UM have these gender differences
with specifically emotional tears. Those very hormonal. But you know, Christen,
there's not always a huge difference in emotional tears. I
mean from the time we're born as babies and then
(07:59):
through rudy, boys and girls are crying at equal rates. Right,
All babies cry because they need to have their most
basic needs fulfilled. They obviously cannot talk, they can't communicate
to their mother in any other way that they need
be fed or changed or whatever, except by crying. Then
something interesting happens. At the age of ten months. Babies
(08:21):
start to exhibit something called manipulative crying. And this is
when they start crying because they want something more than
just you know, food and diaper change. They maybe wants
more attention or toys, toys and molly. This this was
this was a little astounding to me. Some studies have
(08:41):
reported women in particular UM carry on that manipulative crying
behavior throughout life more so than men, just to be
able to give them what they want. So you have
the stereotypical girl who gets pulled over for a speeding
ticket and immediately the waterworks start. And we have an
example of manipula of crying. So you're saying that from
(09:01):
ten months I knew that I could cry just to
get out of an argument if I wanted to. Well,
I'm not saying that, Molly, the research is saying that.
But what a ten month old genius? I was um
And then, like you said, boys and girls do cry
equal amounts until they hit puberty. And then what do
you know, hormones, hormones come into play, and as the
(09:24):
level of testosterone and boys rises, their levels of their
frequency of crying decreases, and the opposite happens to girls
while um estrogen rises and crying goes up as well. Right,
And as we mentioned before, one of the main hormones
that's going on in your tear is pro lactint, which
is the breastfeeding hormone basically. And so of course, when
(09:45):
are going to have much more of this in their body,
even if they're not having babies at the time they
have I think it. Let's see, they have six secret
sent more prolactin in their bodies. That's a lot. That's
that's sort of ridiculous. Of course we cry more, and
so basically they're just saying that routine is always running
in our in our systems, and that's why we're gonna cry.
And do you know how many times, according to one study,
(10:07):
a woman cried in a year, Christen, give it to
me sixty four sixty four times. That's basically a sixth
of your year every day you're crying. I think that's
over blown. Well, what's interesting is the beginning of that study. Uh,
they were supposed to estimate how many times they think
they would cry in here. Everyone undershot it, and then
(10:27):
it ended up being sixty four compared to men who
only cried seventeen year, seventeen times each year. That sounds
about more like it. You know, Well, maybe maybe you
don't have enough prolactin in your body. Well, going back
to this whole whole hormonal explanation for why women cry
more than then, once women and men hit middle age
and menopause kicks in, the gender difference between crying sort
(10:52):
of levels off, doesn't it. Yeah, Basically, as soon as
you know the prolactin isn't running through our bodies, it does.
It does, even out and men might even cry a
little bit more. Are But um, one reason why men
might cry less according to theories, I mean, it's all,
it's all speculative at this point, is that men may
sweat more than women on average. So they're sweating out there.
(11:12):
They're sweating, sad these negative hormones, Yeah, give sweat into
the oldies a whole new, whole new meaning to me.
So we have men's sweating more. We're sweating all their tears.
And also, Molly, men's tear glands, those lacrymal glands are
smaller in men than women. So it might be also
that men simply cannot physically produce as many tears as
(11:36):
we can. Size matters, Yes, it does so basically. Yeah,
I mean with our bigger tear glands, we can produce
more quantity more all the time. We've just got these
mega glands working for us, tears, mega hormones. But Molly,
we might women might have a little bit of a
health advantage since we tend to cry more than men.
(12:00):
Some research has shown that really letting those emotional tears
out can actually lower your risk of heart disease and hypertension,
and also people suffering from conditions like colitis and ulcers
tend to have a less positive attitude about crying than
their healthier counterparts, which seems to indicate a correlation between
(12:21):
you know, your health and whether or not you're crying.
If you're holding in all these tears, all this tension,
it's building up, and it's actually causing health problems, contributing
to health problems. Right. But then on the other side,
sometime that's worrying is that, you know, we know that
women are are diagnosed more often with depression, and crying
is often seen as a symptom of depression as opposed
to something that we may just be doing biologically exactly.
(12:44):
So we sort of have this conundrum of you know,
tears being good and bad physically. What about crying in
let's say the workplace, Oh, christ and it is always
bad to cry in the workplace. Suicide, right, suicide? I mean,
you know, Ellen cried in the workplace. She got blasted
by Bill maher, Hillary cried on the workplace. CNN had
(13:06):
a field day with it. She did win an election,
one election, she won. She won the battle, but not
the war. Yeah, that's true. But um, even on The Apprentice,
the one that was hosted by Martha Stewart. When a
contestant cried, Martha told her women in business do not cry.
Just as there's no crying in baseball, there's no crying
in the workplace. That's right. Um, And this is this
(13:27):
might be kind of hard because women really are more
inclined than men to feel the urge to cry when
they're frustrated. So these smaller frustrations at work, maybe being
late or botching and presentation or just those kind of
small irritants that can build up and get under your
skin will make us want to cry more than men.
But Molly, it might also be because women, socially or not,
(13:49):
um as free to express their anger outwardly. If that
makes sense. Oh, I think so. Like let's say you
asked for a raise it was and I like, you know,
a guy might just go out and throw a stapler,
pound his fists. Yeah. And and then the woman, if
she does that, she is an emotional time um, ticking
(14:09):
away before she was carried away to a straight check.
Right and uh. In this article about women crying in
the workplace from the New York Times, Uh cites a
psychology professor at Yale University who says that if women
could act out like men, there would probably be less tears.
And one book on crying called Crying The Natural and
(14:30):
Cultural History of Tears UM traces this workplace repression of
tears and then back to the Industrial Revolution when managers
would train these male workers to be calm and rational
while you know, the women were still working at home, right,
so they weren't They didn't get this sort of on
the job training about tears. All they know is they
showed up and they could not cry, right, And in
(14:52):
Western culture, there's definitely a stigma of you know, men
being more stoic and not crying so they don't weakness. Right. Basically,
if you do cry, you're showing weakness and you're showing
that you're less um, I guess capable to take on
these small irritants every day. Um. You know, especially if
a woman's in a in a leadership position, if she's
the boss. Uh, you know, I think there'd be a
(15:14):
lot of pressure to not cry, to not lose that composure,
even though you know, like we said that it might
just be sort of a biological response to things that
are going on your body exactly. And speaking of women
in leadership, crying um. One study from Pennsylvania State University
found that men's tears are viewed more positively than women. So, say,
(15:35):
if something stressful is going on in the workplace and
your boss who breaks down a little bit into meeting,
your male boss, I should say, breaks down a little
bit in the meeting, it might be a sign that oh,
he's you know, you see human side of women. He's
just you know, he's a little more sensitive than you
thought he was. Whereas if that was a female boss,
you would tell her to grab her hanky and go home, right,
(15:55):
And it's it definitely. I think people evaluate the cause
of the tear. They'll look at you sort of the
degree of situation, which maybe why something like crying over
a dog on television was really pooh pooed. But if
you cry, like, let's say, over you know, a major
national tragedy that we seem as very dignified, very um
you know, in touch with emotions, et cetera. Right, But okay,
(16:16):
so we know you can't cry in the workplace, but
I can admit every now and then it happens. So
what are we gonna do about it? Let's give people
some tips. If you're in your office, you need to cry,
What should you do? First of all, just keep in
mind that workplace is not the place to cry. You
gotta get out of the office. If if you can't
hold it back and you're not in a meeting or
anything like that and you can step out, do so.
(16:39):
Don't go to the bathroom, right, that is the place
where people normally go to cry. Do not do it
because someone is going to see you, right, and then
that's just gonna lead to goss about you being some
weepy worker. Right, You need to take a walk, go
sit in your car if you have to listen to
some feel good tunes, but in brief, breathe, get away
from the office. And if you aren't a meeting and
(16:59):
you feel a starting to well up inside of you,
don't try and hold your breath because then if you
release it, it might kind of sound like a sob.
So you need to keep breathing deeply, breathing regularly. And
you know, there are all sorts of things you might do,
like pinch your cheek, pinch your leg um, you know,
kind of you know, things like they're coping mechanisms. They're
probably gonna be different for everyone to kind of experiment.
(17:20):
In worst case scenario, you're in a meeting with your boss,
you freak out, you start crying. If that happens, you
got to go to your boss and talk to him
or her afterwards to just let let them know that, Hey, sorry,
I freaked out. This is not normally me and control
of the situation. Yeah, acknowledge the fact that you cried.
(17:41):
Get it out of the way, and acknowledge that you know,
clearly we were talking about a situation where I feel
very passionate. I think you can kind of spin it
into a positive like, you know, I feel very strongly
about this project I was assigned about the reasons I
deserve a raise, etcetera, etcetera. But here's the one thing
you do not do. Yeah, this is this is important,
and this is something that I think everyone one's done
once in a while. To blame it on hormones in
(18:04):
your period. Do not say, oh, I'm sorry, she's having
my period, because while that sounds like an easy excuse,
it does not help your working sisters, right. It does
not reflect well on you as a professional. You got
a suprofessional, Yeah, Kristen, Big girls don't cry dot dot
dot in the workplace. But I don't want to sound
too down on tears. I mean, when we started, we
(18:24):
were talking about how tears are sort of a biological
response to hormones you've got to get out of your body.
There is a reason why we refer to crying sometimes
as a good cry. It can have very positive health results,
like we mentioned before, and also just um positive psychological effects. Uh.
There was a study that came out in December two
thousand and eight from the Journal of Social and Clinical
(18:46):
Psychology about um whether or not crying actually is cathartic,
whether that emotional release really is a positive thing. And
of course it found mixed results that depended completely on
when and where you cry. So let's say you are
upset in the workplace, you run into the bathroom, you're sobbing,
your boss walks and sees you crying, It's probably not
(19:07):
going to be a very cathartic positive experience. Uh. The
results of the study found that if an order for
a cry to be a positive experience, it needs to
have UM three elements. You need to have social support
surrounding this. If you are crying in front of somebody,
it needs to be someone who is encouraging you and
you know, coaching you through things, saying it's gonna be okay.
(19:28):
Then second, there needs to be some kind of resolution
to whatever made you cry in the first place. If
it was like, um, you know, stressful job presentation, go back,
think about what you did, think about how you could,
you know, maybe do better the next time, and then
have a new understanding of whatever made you cry as well.
So kind of have to come full circle with the
(19:49):
whole crying experience in order for an emotional cry to
really be an honest cleansing experience. Wow, that was really impressive, Kristen.
Kind of makes me want to go home and watch
Beaches with you. Yeah, I could. I could use it
cry now all right, so while we um go have
a good cry, cry it out, Cry it out, And
(20:10):
if you want to tell us your crying story or
just have any other questions or comments about the podcast,
you can email us at mom Stuff at how stuff
works dot com. And if you have more questions about crying,
check out how Crying Works via Leah Hoyt on how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com.
(20:33):
Want more, How stuff Works. Check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready,
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