Men and Crying

Why is it that crying and being emotional is always associated with women and not much with men? Is it true that men do not cry out at all? No, it is natural to remote to both good and bad things that happen in one’s lifetime. But before that let’s have a peek into crying.

What is crying? It is an emotional outburst where tears roll out of the eyes and are one of the ways to express one’s grief. If bottled up, the emotion gets suppressed and compressed inside one’s self and there are possibilities that one could end up with many ailments like heart attacks, strokes, mental disorders, etc.

Women are more vulnerable to crying than men. We can see girls crying out, for example, when there is a breakup in a relationship, when there is a death or a calamity in the family, etc, etc. At times, the crying of a little girl can be for mere petty issues like asking for candy, wanting to go for a ride, etc. But when men cry? We can hardly see men cry out in public. Why is it so?

Men are nurtured in such a way by parents to not to cry in public as they are all categorized as macho. A boy grows into a man idolizing his dad, and if his dad does not cry out in public, he does not either. Moreover, there are parents who instruct their sons not to cry out before others and must cry only when he is alone.

It is both mentals as well as a chemical issue, as the culprit is the male hormone testosterone, which slows down the parasympathetic nervous system which is responsible for this outburst of emotion, that is crying.

It is not that little boys do not cry, they do cry in the beginning, but as they grow older and older, they tend to become like their fathers and try hard to control their emotions. It is a million dollar question whether this control of emotions is good or bad to one’s health. As we have seen earlier suppressing the grief might land us in many severe critical conditions both physically and mentally.

A survey of both men and women on emotional barricades showed that men did show more physiological changes than women when allowed to watch some video clippings that were highly dramatic with lots of heartbreaking emotions. But of course comparatively, women were more emotional than men and burst out with tears whereas men did control their tears.

This shows that most of the women are just like tender flowers that are very soft in nature both physically and mentally, whereas, men are stronger than women in this criteria.  But is it a good healthy one? No, it is nature’s creation that we all must emote to pain, happiness, sadness, frustrations, etc. and compressing this could lead to bad health.

Of course, there is some good news to the females who cry a lot on a regular basis as the tears that roll out actually washes away all the dirt in the eyes and makes the eyes more beautiful and attractive.

But men do have their own way of letting out their anger, emotional pain, grief etc by going in for punch bagging, boxing, wrestling, etc. Of course, there are options of going in for drinking alcohol or smoking cigars, which would complicate things further and deteriorate the condition from bad to worse.

But psychologists say that sportsmen who do shed out tears with the victory as well as loss have a high self-esteem and do not feel ashamed that they cried out in public. It is just a natural phenomenon.

So men out there, there is absolutely nothing wrong with letting one’s emotions out, and if crying is one of the options, please let it go.

But for heaven’s sake do not opt for excessive alcohol intake, drugs, or smoking to combat the grief. If you are very particular about not to cry, we do have other openings like yoga, meditation, pranayama, etc to calm down the mind as well as the body.