[Edited]

"Now laughing friends deride tears I cannot hide,
so I smile and say 'when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes'"

You guys must be thinking.. what happened to this gal again... why she blog such a topic ah... seriously i m okie la.. juz feeling a bit emo lor..

was listening to Yes 933 in the morning... and the DJ asked a qns.

Do you like to cry? Is Crying Good for Health?

well personally for people who are closed to me, they will definitely say i am a crybaby.. drop tears easily, esp in watching shows, worse reading books even on public transport (e.g. Mrt, Bus). ya, i know i usually scared the person sitting opposite or beside me... well.. i can just say its just uncontrollable... feel touched and tears will automatically flow down.. so nxt time if bringing me for touching movies.. pls beware

Opps to continue.. the DJ say that actually crying is benefical to our health, dunno becoz of what reason which i forgot.. but then there is a condition: you can only cried up to 15min each time, exceeding 15min will cause harm to your health.. so please beware...

So i decided to do some research on this issue. Ya.. i now blogging from office at 0715pm..

Is Crying Good For You?

A summarise finding:

From a biological perspective three kinds of tears are distinguished (Lutz 1999);

1) "Basal tears" are continuous and lubricate our eyes

2) "reflex or infant tears" occur when we chop onions or receive a blow to the eye

3) "emotional tears" are psychologically caused.

Different views are presented by different famous people (scientists):

Psychotherapists and counsellors from nearly every school /persuasion

Crying is the process of therapy - constructive rather than destructive, though there may be some exceptions to this general rule such as depression, some neuropsychological conditions and manipulative crying. Sometimes a patient enters the therapy office for the first session and may cry with relief within minutes in the presence of the therapist, who is effectively a total stranger. Often patients who cry during sessions whilst talking about subjects of crucial emotional importance to them, spontaneously say how much better they feel or may report in the next session how they were upset at the time but felt much better afterwards. Whereas in normal life people may try to steer others away from crying, in therapy the psychologist often steers into crying.

Frey, Desota-Johnson, Hoffman & McCall (1981)

The difference between the biochemical composition of emotional tears compared to irritant tears is that the protein concentration of emotional tears was 24% greater than irritant tears. The complex proteins in emotional tears were those involved in the human stress response. Proposed that tears performed a sort of physical catharsis, expelling toxins from the body.

Efran & Spangler (1979)
Proposed a type of physiological catharsis.

Following a period of sympathetic nervous system hyperactivity, crying is part of a parasympathetic rebound effect in which tears serve to discharge arousal.

So conclusion:

There is a dilemma - people universally report crying is beneficial but the laboratory says something different.

Perhaps this simply reflects the difference between the laboratory and real life. The laboratory requires experimental stimuli that are objectively similar for all subjects and the 'weepie' movie is ideal.

Stimuli need to be applied within a controlled time and place.

In real life the stresses are personally meaningful and build up over days, weeks, months or sometimes years. They spontaneously come to a head; the person cries. This natural and personalised event is difficult to capture and study and the laboratory may simply be failing to come to grips with 'the real thing'.
On the other hand, it has been suggested that during crying the person experiences raised levels of physiological arousal. When the arousal returns to previous levels, it is experienced as feeling better (Kraemer & Hastrup 1988). In other words, the person does not really feel better but only feels better by a sort of 'contrast effect' with their distress during crying. In this scenarios all the self report interviews could be nothing more than self delusion.
So is crying good for you? - maybe it is Yes but pls don't do it in a Lab enviroment...

For me.. i will just let my tears flow.. when they like.. maybe its just me.. a part of showing the emotional aspect of myself... but maybe i will tim the duration my tears flow.. :>