The Tribune

By DIANE PHILLIPS

WE humans are so hard to understand, complex and complicated beyond reason. We cry when we are happy and we cry when we are sad. We laugh when something is funny or when we connect with an old friend – or when we are just plain embarrassed because we don’t know what else to do except to laugh it off at times when like when we burp at an awkward moment or attempt to shake a dignitary’s hand and bow our head ever so slightly but bump into their chest or breast because we lowered our head a little too far and leaned in a little too much and now we don’t know what to say except we feel like crying and disappearing through a hole in the ground but instead we do what any sane human being would do – we laugh because if we didn’t laugh we would cry.

Yup, when it comes to the extreme in emotional expressions, laughter and tears, we are a hot mixed-up mess. Sometimes we can’t even keep them straight, so we start laughing and before we know it we laughed so hard we are crying. Or we cry because we are so happy at the good news we just heard and as the tears roll down our cheeks, slowing to a drip, then our lips start their own involuntary muscle movement heading in the opposite direction with the ends turning upward and the mouth following a bit behind and for no reason that we understand or even stop to figure out, we have gone from needing a tissue to catch our tears to needing a second to catch our breath.

It makes no sense – the very news that caused us to cry caused us to shed the tears of joy and transform our body into a response mode that makes us laugh.

So what is it about us that drives our bodies between these emotions over which we have no control or seem to have no control, feelings that start out one way and end up at the opposite end of the spectrum?

It wouldn’t work in a football game where the goal posts don’t change because the quarterback feels a shift in temperament or thought something was funny or wanted to bond with a former teammate on the opposite side of the field. It wouldn’t happen anywhere else, in fact, except in the inexplicable human psyche. Changing emotional reactions seems to happen without our having any say in it whatsoever as if our crying and laughing gearshift had a mind of its own.

The mystery of why we laugh, why we cry

While why we laugh and why we cry and why we mix up those extremes is still pretty much a mystery, there are a few things we have learned in recent years.

The adage that it takes 43 muscles to frown and only 17 to smile has now been relegated to that bucket of beliefs that never should have existed in the first place.

Was it propaganda aimed at creating a healthier, happier population? If so, who organised it and how did they get away with persuading the world it was the truth for so long when the reality is that the number of muscles used to smile or frown is almost identical – more like 12 to frown and 11 to smile.

Scientists can name each of those muscles – and most of them are different – but what’s the point of sharing information you will never use again unless you are at a cocktail party struggling to make conversation with a fresh out of med school bore who you are trying to impress with your muscle memory?

And that reminds me. Muscle memory is not what it sounds like – it has nothing to do with your ability to remember the names or uses or anatomical locations of muscles. It’s the memory logged in to the muscle itself that allows it to repeat a like motion over and over again without giving it a second thought.

In tennis, if you return a ball hit straight down the line to your forehand three times, and your opponent suddenly sends a wicked slice to the far backhand corner you have to unplant, reverse plant to whip the return back from where it went the three times earlier and move your backside, feet, racquet and mind to the backhand quarter in far less time than it took to read this long sentence. You have to “untrain” your muscle that had adjusted to memory if you have any chance to reach the ball, make the return, and keep the point alive and the game going.

Three kinds of tears

We also learned that there are different kinds of tears. There are basal tears, the kind that keep your eyes lubricated day and night and that we rarely think about. As friends of the body go, they are vastly underrated.

Then there are the kind we all think of as connected with crying – psychological or emotional tears. Those are the ones triggered by an emotional moment, provoked by a sad ending to a movie where the character who was finally going to confess he loved her all along is run over by a truck as he crosses the street to her door.

Those are the real tears, the physical emotional ones that flow without warning destroying our mascara and, if inadvertently bursting at the wrong time, possibly destroying something far greater, like a relationship.

They, at least, have a respectable root cause – we cry those tears in response to an emotional event whether it impacted us directly or we internalized what it did to another, the malnourished child with fearful eyes, the homeless grandmother sleeping on a coat on the street, the abandoned scrawny dog begging for love, a TV appeal designed to stab us in our heart and draw tears that prompt us to put our hands in our pockets to fix a problem that makes us want to cry.

Then we have irritant tears, Mother Nature’s sometimes protective, often annoying tears that come in response to outside sources - chopping garlic or onion or being too close to smoke. As much as you try to stop them, they are tears with a mind of their own.

Benefits of crying

In almost all ways, crying can be good for you. As you cry, your body releases oxytocin and endorphins, hormones that lift your mood, elevate you to a keener awareness and account for why you miraculously feel better at the end of a good cry. Oxytocin, often referred to as the “love hormone”, plays a hidden role helping nursing mothers bond while they feed.

And the greatest irony - the acceptance of crying is related not only to national cultures but often to the level of wealth. In poorer populations, children and adults are expected to suck it up, just take it and move on whereas in richer environs, there is more understanding and forgiveness – go ahead, cry, let it out.

Time to grieve or express sadness through tears is on the side of those with means. Experience the sadness, don’t try to bury it. Of course that is expected to be somewhat of a temporary approval, not a prescription for how to spend next Saturday.

Despite that empirical evidence, it does not explain the practices that we all know - moms admonishing boys not to be a cry baby or how the British manage to keep a stiff upper lip no matter how great their pain or wealth.

So while letting go and shedding those tears can lead to a feeling of a new beginning - think of it as a cleansing - deliberately holding back tears or feeling shame about crying or wanting to cry can have the opposite effect.

Stifling that emotion, holding back the tears can cause the body and psyche react negatively, producing what those of us who are not trained in these things would just call the hormones of unhappiness. But they are real.

So there truly is a fine art to laughing and crying and choosing which to do when but one caveat remains unchanged – let the crying cleanse the soul but remember laughter truly is the best medicine.