The neurologist and the psychologist agree that crying is therapeutic and serves to reassure and relieve us
you cry? You do good. Except for symptoms of illness or more serious, neurologist and psychologist agree that crying is therapeutic and serves to reassure and relieve us. From China to the Alaskan Eskimos, crying can be extrapolated to almost all cultures. How is your process? Why do men cry less?
Crying, like laughing, is an emotional expression, and has an important value both for communication, because we tell the world how we feel; as for health, because with crying we express an emotion when the option of not doing it would not be healthy.
"Crying can be therapeutic because it relieves tension and also because it can increase social support by awakening empathy," explains Antonio Cano, a psychologist and professor at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Therefore, according to the expert, crying has benefits such as "the relief, the expression of an emotional physiological activation that needs to be expressed, relief, and empathy." The crying is healthy, although we must remember that it is not if you cry to achieve goals, because "it makes us dependent" or cry because you have a depression, because the healthy disappears.
Crying can help manage emotions, so much so that sometimes even if we do not want we can not avoid crying, because "emotional expression is above the will", says the specialist. This is because "we have two different parts in our brain, a prefrontal part" where we have the executive functions and where the will resides, we value reality and make decisions; "And a very automatic and involuntary part, very little conscious that regulates a part of the emotions part, the amygdala".
Thus, when a danger arises the first thing that is activated is the amygdala, not the prefrontal cortex, and before we decide whether or not we are at risk we are already reacting emotionally because it is a faster way to save us, even when there are contradictions between that you think and what the amygdala decides to do ", because" there is a part of the emotion that is expressed against your will ", the professor emphasizes.
Why do men cry less?
In addition to the function that the patriarchal and cultural heritage fulfill, positioning man as a being that should not mourn and relating it to a sign of weakness, there is also a biological explanation in something that makes us not better or worse, but different. According to Antonio Cano, "men and women have different needs to cry," because women "have a different hormonal system, biological differences that facilitate emotional expression to women."
Manuel Arias, neurologist and coordinator of the Humanities group of the Spanish Society of Neurology (SEN), highlights that crying is "a very complex and different brain function between sexes". Women cry more than men as "an autotherapy that allows them to calm down" because "brain structure is not the same in women as in men". In fact, alexithymia, an inability to express feelings, "occurs more frequently in some men," he confirms.
How is crying made?
The action of crying is a more cerebral function, although it is "a complex function that does not have a place of the clear brain that governs it, but rather it is rather diffuse", explains the neurologist.
Generally we cry before an emotion of negative valence, when suffering that kind of disgust "a process is started in which, by the action of crying, you have to contract the muscles of the face (situation that depends on the activation through of the facial nerve), also have to contract the lacrimal glands, including the sob and the vocalizations of the language ", which is why many areas intervene.
For example, independently, we can cry if we eat an onion, through tears and the "autonomic or vegetative nervous system". But it would not be the crying we refer to.
In addition, there are also certain diseases in which there is pathological crying. "There are people where you can start a cry for no reason for a few minutes," says the expert.
Therefore, yes to crying, when it is not synonymous with illness. Yes to relief, to the expression of emotions and their ability to generate empathy.