What is it about crying that is so beneficial for a person? “Beneficial” may not be the best term but when someone is upset, often times crying will be a sort of outlet for some of the grief or sorrow that is causing the person to be upset and it helps the person cope.
But why? What is it about the act of crying that makes us feel better? Is it strictly the physical act of ‘purging’ some of the awful feelings inside? Or is it a way to encapsulate oneself in self-sympathy and the relief comes from having a psychological ‘crutch’ of sorts? I know personally, being upset and NOT crying feels a lot emptier and lonlier than being upset and crying. But I’m not sure exactly why.
There are measurable differences in the tears produced when crying due to emotional stress as opposed to crying for other reasons. Tears of emotional stress have higher levels of several hormones, including adrenocorticotropic hormone - produced by the pituitary gland when the body is under stress and in turn causes the adrenal glands to produce corticosteroids.
There is conjecture that the release of these hormones through the lacrimal glands helps purge an overload of stress hormones (from the brain? the pituitary gland? the bloodstream?) and provide release, and most people who put this argument forward cite the recognized feeling of catharsis at the end of a “good” cry. Those who argue against it point out that most people have a favorable bias towards memories of that relief and tend to forget or neglect times when their crying hasn’t provided emotional relief. (Crying as Catharsis Isn’t Always the Case - The New York Times)
I think the latter argument misses the point a bit, because it depends on data such as depressed persons not feeling the same amount of relief after crying (depression is, to the best of our knowledge, caused by an imbalance of neurotransmitters of the brain, so it’s not hard to recognize that a mechanism which works in healthy brains would not work in an unhealthy brain) or that mockery, anger, or shaming from others during crying caused the person to feel worse (so intense social/emotional stress can defeat a possible mechanism for relieving stress?).
I tend to go with a combination of explanations:
crying notifies others in the social group that you are under stress and need help.
crying interrupts a stressor event by overwhelming the mind with another intense activity.
crying provides a way to reduce the amount of stress hormones in the bloodstream.
human culture has nurtured the belief that crying provides relief from emotional pain and stress, we believe it on a very primal level, so when we cry, we fulfill that prediction and are rewarded for it.