Emotional tears do contain stress hormones, but the popular idea that crying “flushes” these hormones out of your body in meaningful amounts is more complicated than it sounds. Researchers have confirmed that tears shed from emotion have a different chemical makeup than tears caused by onions or wind. However, the actual stress relief you feel after a good cry likely comes from a different mechanism entirely: changes in your nervous system, not the tiny volume of fluid leaving your eyes.
What’s Actually in Emotional Tears
Not all tears are created equal. Your eyes produce three types: basal tears that keep your corneas lubricated, reflex tears triggered by irritants like smoke, and emotional tears produced by feelings of sadness, frustration, or even joy. The chemistry of emotional tears is distinct. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, emotional tears contain higher levels of prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH, a key stress-signaling hormone), leucine-enkephalin (a natural painkiller), potassium, and manganese compared to reflex tears.
This finding, originally reported by biochemist William Frey in the 1980s, launched the popular theory that crying is the body’s way of literally expelling stress chemicals. The logic was appealing: your body makes stress hormones, those hormones show up in tears, so crying must be draining them away. It became one of those facts repeated so often that most people accept it without question.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
When researchers have tried to confirm that crying lowers stress hormone levels in the body, the results have been surprisingly flat. A study published in the journal Emotion measured cortisol (the body’s primary stress hormone) in saliva before and after participants watched sad films. The researchers compared three groups: people who cried, people who watched the same sad content but didn’t cry, and people who watched neutral videos. They predicted that criers would show lower cortisol levels afterward and recover faster from a subsequent stressor.
Neither prediction held up. There were no differences between the three groups in cortisol changes, and criers didn’t withstand a follow-up stressful task any longer than non-criers. The volume of tears you produce during a cry is extremely small, likely a fraction of a milliliter. Even though those tears contain stress hormones, the amount leaving your body is negligible compared to what’s circulating in your bloodstream. Crying simply can’t move the needle on your overall hormone levels through fluid loss alone.
Why Crying Still Helps With Stress
If tears don’t flush hormones, why does crying so often feel like a release? The answer appears to lie in your nervous system rather than your tear ducts. Crying activates both branches of your autonomic nervous system in sequence, and that sequence matters.
During the peak of a crying episode, your sympathetic nervous system (the “fight or flight” system) ramps up. Your heart rate increases, you may sweat more, and your body enters a state of high arousal. But as the crying winds down, the parasympathetic nervous system takes over. This is the branch responsible for rest, recovery, and slowing your heart rate. The vagus nerve, which runs from your brainstem to your abdomen and influences your heart, lungs, and gut, plays a central role. Because the tear gland shares nerve pathways with the vagus nerve, producing emotional tears appears to co-activate the broader calming response.
The sobbing itself also changes your breathing. The deep, shuddering breaths during and after a cry resemble the kind of deliberate slow breathing used in relaxation techniques. Researchers suggest that crying may help maintain biological balance, or homeostasis, partly through conscious self-soothing via these breathing patterns and partly through unconscious regulation of heart rate. The relief you feel isn’t from what left your body in your tears. It’s from your nervous system shifting gears.
The Recovery Phase Is What Matters
One of the more revealing findings in crying research involves what happens in the minutes after you stop. In non-depressed individuals, a measure of vagal tone called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (essentially, healthy variation in heart rate linked to breathing) increases as crying resolves. This rebound is a sign that the body’s calming system is kicking in and actively restoring equilibrium. It’s this recovery phase that produces the sensation of emotional relief.
Notably, this rebound was absent in people with depression. Depressed individuals who cried did not show the same parasympathetic recovery afterward, which may explain why crying often feels unsatisfying or even worse for people experiencing clinical depression. The self-regulatory mechanism that makes crying feel cathartic appears to be compromised when mood disorders are present. So the common experience of “feeling better after a cry” is real, but it depends on underlying neurological functioning, not on what’s in the tears themselves.
Why Some People Cry More Than Others
Prolactin, one of the hormones found at elevated levels in emotional tears, also plays a role in how easily you cry in the first place. Prolactin levels rise significantly during puberty in girls, and researchers have long attributed the gender gap in crying frequency (which emerges around age 13) partly to this hormonal shift. Higher baseline prolactin appears to lower the threshold for tear production, making emotional crying more readily triggered. This is one reason women cry an estimated two to five times more frequently than men on average, though social and cultural factors clearly contribute as well.
The Bottom Line on Tears and Stress
Emotional tears genuinely contain stress-related hormones like ACTH and natural painkillers like leucine-enkephalin. That part of the popular claim is accurate. But the idea that crying provides stress relief by physically removing these chemicals from your body doesn’t hold up to experimental testing. The amounts are too small to matter biochemically. What crying does accomplish is trigger a nervous system reset: a shift from high arousal to parasympathetic recovery that slows your heart, deepens your breathing, and creates a genuine sense of calm. The relief is real. The mechanism is just different from what most people think.