Read it and weep: why regular crying is cathartic

According to Yoshida, a professional “tears teacher”, or namida sensei, this is not unusual in Japan. “Crying is considered a sign of weakness and a lack of self-control,” he tells me. “The Japanese find crying embarrassing.”

Sadly, the Japanese are not alone. In Britain, crying has long been derided as a sign of emotional fragility, especially in men, hence the tradition, dating back to the Edwardian period, of “the stiff upper lip”.

But in recent decades, this taboo has been breaking down. Think of the tear that rolled down the cheek of the former chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, during Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013, surprising his critics, such as the BBC’s John Humphrys, who assumed Osborne was not “the sort of person” who wept in public.

Or consider Keith Brymer Jones, the emotionally labile judge of Channel 4’s The Great Pottery Throwdown, who seemingly needs only to look at a contestant’s clay creation to burst into tears – a display that has made him wildly popular with viewers.

Although scientific studies show that women tend to cry five to 10 times as often as men, these days male tears are far less of a taboo. Indeed, Yoshida argues tears are cathartic and good for your health. “I used to catch colds regularly, but after I started this work and made a habit of crying once a week, I don’t catch colds any more,” he says.

At his Tears and Travel Café in Tokyo, Yoshida holds weekly crying workshops where, using films and stories as prompts, he persuades people working in sectors including finance, IT and medicine to let down their guard and give vent to their feelings.

Yoshida argues that even a single tear is sufficient to relieve stress. However, to reap the full benefits, he says, you should cry freely and regularly. “It is ideal to wail. The harder you cry the better you feel.”

It seems the British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley shared this view, writing in 1897 that “the sorrow that has no vent in tears may make other organs weep”.

But is this true? Are tears always cathartic or are there situations in which crying might be counterproductive? And how and why did tears evolve in the first place, and what might they signify?

In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin argued that tears were an “incidental result” of evolution, “as purposeless as the secretion of tears from a blow outside the eye”.

However, in recent decades, scientists have put forward several theories of how tears may have conferred an evolutionary advantage. One idea is that just like hairlessness, bipedalism, and other human oddities, tears are an adaptive response to saltwater living. Another is that tears evolved to keep the eye moist and free of bacteria and/or to prevent the rapid drying of the mucous membranes of an infant’s nose and throat. Then there is the intriguing suggestion that tears are a “gesture of surrender” that signals to an aggressor that the crier is in distress and incapable of causing harm.

Ad Vingerhoets, a Dutch psychologist who has spent more than 20 years studying when and why humans cry, has another theory. He believes that tears became associated with vocal distress calls in infants by accident. This is because when infants wail, they tend to squeeze the muscles around their eyes, putting mechanical pressure on the eyeball. Tears, in other words, are the product of a reflex response.

“You may notice that when you squeeze your eye muscles, your eyes become moist,” says Vingerhoets. “This mechanism can also explain why we sometimes produce tears when we laugh, yawn or vomit.”

Children also cry when hungry, when they feel pain, or are cold and crave physical contact with their mothers. In this respect, says Vingerhoets, crying can be seen as a sort of “acoustical umbilical cord”.

However, humans are the only species in which crying persists into adulthood, although there are anecdotal reports of apes, elephants and pets crying from time to time.

As Thomas Dixon, a historian of emotions and the author of Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears, puts it: “Tears are intellectual things. They are produced both by thoughts and the lachrymal glands. In each age, different texts collaborate with different bodies to produce tears with different meanings.”

Tears are also highly symbolic. Think of the Room of Tears in the Sistine Chapel where, after voting in the Vatican conclave, the new pope dons his papal robes for the first time and is faced with the realisation that his life will never be the same again. For Catholics, as for others who share the Christian faith, tears are a sign of piety and humility before God. From King David’s laments to Jesus’s tears at the tomb of Lazarus to the “weeping prophet” Jeremiah, the Bible treats crying as an act thick with meaning – a sacred expression of the soul.

However, while accepting that tears can be symbolic, Vingerhoets challenges the belief that crying is cathartic. Analysis of thousands of reports of crying episodes show that on average only half of respondents report feeling better after crying, whereas 40% experience no change, and 10% feel worse.

Moreover, people who are depressed or suffer from burnout tend to cry more often but never report feeling better. Another crucial factor is whether tears influence bystanders. “It is an entirely different story when they react with understanding and comfort than when they respond with disapproval and irritation,” says Vingerhoets.

However, while studies suggest that crying over uncontrollable, adverse events, such as the sudden death of a parent or child, is unlikely to be cathartic, this is not true of controllable situations – such as weeping at an emotional film or story. And this is certainly Yoshida’s experience.

At his workshops, Yoshida begins by showing clients a moving scene from a film or a beautiful picture from nature. He says a particularly effective story is about a father who talks to his dead son’s ashes while clutching a bunch of flowers; another is about a woman who falls in love with her partner all over again after he loses his memory.

After viewing the images, Yoshida asks his clients to think about which moments stood out for them. Next, he encourages them to reflect on why they found the moments significant and how those moments connect to their own experiences. Having done that, they place their notes in a “tear box”. The final stage comes when Yoshida selects a note at random and invites the person to read it aloud. This is usually the trigger that enables them to cry freely.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Yoshida is convinced that for most people crying is cathartic. As an example, he cites “Ms E”, a woman with chronic insomnia because of “menopausal anxiety and irritability”. After attending one of his workshops, says Yoshida, Ms E cried and slept soundly for the first time in months, telling him: “I felt as if my tears had cleansed my heart.”

Another client, “Ms D”, who had “fatigue and mild depression at work”, said that after shedding tears she felt she could smile “for the first time in a long time”.

Since setting up as a tear teacher in 2015, Yoshida claims to have brought more than 50,000 people to tears. In addition to Japan, he has held crying workshops in Taiwan, Bhutan and the US, and this summer plans to visit India, Thailand and the Netherlands. He is also keen to organise a workshop in the UK if he can find an appropriate venue.

But what, I wonder, makes him cry? “That’s easy,” he replies. “Grandmothers.”

Yoshida explains that his parents were poor and worked all hours to make ends meet, so it fell to his grandmother to raise him. Although she died aged 71 when Yoshida was 20, he still thinks of her often. “In Japan, grandmothers symbolise love,” he tells me.

Who wouldn’t weep at that?

Photograph Getty Images