What Stopping Your Tears Is Actually Doing to Your Body — and the People You Love Most
Phyllis stood on a train platform recently and said goodbye to a dear friend named Friedman. She lives far from him. She doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. When the train pulled in, the tears came. Automatically.
She didn’t stop them. She looked at him and said, “Oh — it is so sad to tell you goodbye.”
If I stop the tears, I’d have to disassociate. I’d have to distance myself from saying goodbye. Instead, I let them flow — and my body just regulates itself again.
Most of us were taught the opposite move. Swallow. Smile. Step back. Politely leave our own bodies for a minute — just enough to get through the goodbye without making it weird.
It feels strong. It feels mature. It feels like the right thing to do.
It is actually costing you more than you know.
The Tiny Detail Inside a Tear
Here is something you probably did not learn in school.
A biochemist named William Frey did something simple in the 1980s. He compared two kinds of tears — the ones you cry chopping an onion (reflex tears) and the ones you cry when you are feeling something (emotional tears). They look the same. They are not the same.
Emotional tears carry much higher amounts of three things: ACTH (a stress hormone your body releases when it goes on high alert), prolactin (another stress-related hormone), and leucine-enkephalin (a natural painkiller your body makes on its own) (Frey, 1985).
In other words: when you cry, your body is literally taking stress chemistry and sending it out.
The tear is the exit ramp.
What Happens When You Block That Exit
So what happens when you swallow it instead?
That stress chemistry does not disappear. It has nowhere to go. ACTH keeps signaling your adrenal glands. Your body stays in alarm mode. Your nervous system never gets the message that the moment has passed.
James Gross at Stanford has been studying this exact thing for over twenty years. He calls it expressive suppression — when you feel the emotion fully but clamp down on the outside. His findings, replicated again and again (Gross & Levenson, 1997; Gross, 2002):
- Your heart rate goes up, not down.
- Your stress chemistry stays elevated longer.
- You actually remember the moment less clearly than people who let the emotion show.
- And — here is the one that hurts — you feel less close to the person right in front of you.
Read that last one again. Suppressing the tears does not just keep stress in your body. It puts distance between you and whoever is in the room.
The Stanford team also studied couples (Roberts, Levenson, & Gross, 2008). When one partner suppressed during a difficult conversation, both people’s blood pressure went up. Your body knows when someone next to you is shut down. It feels it. It responds to it.
Shut off the tears. Shut off the closeness. Same move.
This is exactly what Phyllis described in her own words. If I stop the tears, I’d have to distance myself from saying goodbye. The suppression was not the cost. The goodbye was.
We call that a still face. Physically present, relationally absent. We are not built for it. Babies escalate within seconds when a parent goes still-faced. There is no birthday where that changes. We are all just older babies.
The still face you put on for your own emotion creates the same distance as the still face you put on for theirs.
The Nineteen Seconds Nobody Tells You About
Here is the part that changes everything.
Research shows that a core emotion — Sad, Hurt, Fear, Lonely — cannot last more than about nineteen seconds in your body if nothing reactivates it.
Nineteen seconds.
That is how long the wave wants to take. If you let it move, it moves. If someone next to you sits with you for it instead of trying to fix it — it moves. Your body knows what to do.
But if you swallow it? It does not move. It just goes underground and waits.
We are nineteen seconds away from changing the way our closest moments feel. Most of us have never given the wave that long.
The Couple in the Living Room
You are not on a train platform. You are in your living room. Your partner is across from you. Something heavy is right under the surface.
If they cry — or come close to it — and you reach for fixing, encouraging, it’ll be okay, babe — you have just done something Solomon warned about three thousand years ago:
“Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day, or like vinegar poured on a wound, is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.” — Proverbs 25:20 (NIV)
Picture that. Someone is freezing. You walk over and pull off their coat. Someone has an open wound. You pour vinegar on it. That is what cheerful fixing feels like to a heavy heart. Not because your heart was wrong — your intention was loving. But the impact landed like getting their clothes yanked off on a cold winter day.
The unintended message: Your sadness is too much for me. Don’t bring it in here.
So they smile a little. I’m fine. They go do the dishes. The stress chemistry stays in their body. The closeness drops a notch.
Here is what you do instead.
Oooo. Make a sound. Mmm. Oh. Oof. Out loud. Not agreement. Not advice. Not a Bible verse. Just a sound that says: I’m here. I’m with you. Keep going. It is the opposite of a still face. It tells their body it is safe to let the wave come.
Then: What’s happening? Never why. “Why are you crying?” prosecutes. “What’s happening?” invites.
Then — and this is the one nobody warns you about — more Oooo. They will say a sentence. Your instinct will be to respond, explain, soothe. Don’t. Make another sound. Stay there.
Give it nineteen seconds.
You will be amazed at what moves through.
Two Practices for This Week
For you. Next time the wave rises in you — in the car, on a phone call, looking at an old photo — don’t stop it. Don’t manage it. Don’t joke past it.
Just say, out loud or quietly to yourself: Oh — there’s some Sad here. Take one slow breath. Give it nineteen seconds.
The stress chemistry leaves. The closeness stays.
For your partner. Next time your partner’s eyes get glassy — or their voice catches, or they go quiet in the middle of a story — try this exact sequence. No fixing. No verses. No it’ll be okay.
- Oooo. Out loud. Mmm. Oh. Oof. Just a sound.
- What’s happening? Soft. Curious. Not why.
- More Oooo. Whatever they say next, keep the sound going. Let the wave move.
Give it nineteen seconds before you say one more word.
That is the trade most of us never knew we were making.
Let the tears flow.
Join Us on the Journey
What you just read is one small piece of a much bigger language for connection. In September, we are launching the Connection Codes app — a community of people learning to do exactly this together. Daily practices. Live teachings from Dr. Glenn and Phyllis. Real people doing the work of staying present with the people they love.
We are sharing the doors first with our newsletter family. Grab your free Core Emotion Wheel and you’ll be the first to know when the app opens:
→ Get the free Core Emotion Wheel
Watch Phyllis on the train platform: Instagram reel
References
Frey, W. H. (1985). Crying: The mystery of tears. Winston Press.
Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39(3), 281–291. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048577201393198
Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-843X.106.1.95
Roberts, N. A., Levenson, R. W., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Cardiovascular costs of emotion suppression cross ethnic lines. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 70(1), 82–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2008.06.003
Rottenberg, J., Bylsma, L. M., & Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2008). Is crying beneficial? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(6), 400–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00614.x
Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M. (2013). Why only humans weep: Unravelling the mysteries of tears. Oxford University Press.
Comments +