Crying does appear to release stress hormones, but the picture is more nuanced than the popular idea of “flushing out” stress through tears. Emotional tears contain measurably higher levels of stress-related hormones compared to the tears you shed from chopping onions or getting dust in your eye. At the same time, the biggest stress-relief benefit of crying likely comes not from what leaves your body in teardrops, but from how crying shifts your nervous system into a calmer state.
What’s Actually in Emotional Tears
Your body produces three types of tears: basal tears that keep your eyes moist around the clock, reflex tears triggered by irritants like smoke or onion fumes, and emotional tears. These are not the same fluid. Emotional tears contain higher concentrations of proteins, making them thicker and stickier. They cling to your skin and roll down your face more slowly than the watery reflex tears designed to flush out debris.
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, researchers have found higher levels of several stress-related compounds in emotional tears, including prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH, which signals your adrenal glands to produce cortisol), and leu-enkephalin (a natural painkiller). Potassium and manganese are also elevated. The hypothesis is straightforward: if these stress-related chemicals are concentrated in emotional tears, shedding those tears may help remove them from the body and nudge it back toward balance. That said, this idea remains preliminary and hasn’t been conclusively proven through large-scale replication.
The Cortisol Question
If crying truly flushes out stress hormones, you’d expect to see measurably lower cortisol levels in people after a good cry. Researchers tested this directly by measuring salivary cortisol at four separate time points in people who cried during sad films, people who watched the same films without crying, and people who watched neutral videos. The result was surprising: there were no significant differences in cortisol changes between the three groups. People who cried didn’t show lower cortisol afterward compared to those who held it together.
This doesn’t mean crying is useless for stress relief. It means the mechanism is probably not as simple as tears carrying cortisol out of your body. The volume of fluid in a few tears is tiny compared to your total blood volume, so any direct chemical removal would be minimal. The real action seems to happen through your nervous system.
How Crying Activates Your “Rest and Recover” System
The strongest evidence for crying’s stress-relief effect centers on the parasympathetic nervous system, the branch responsible for slowing your heart rate, conserving energy, and promoting recovery. Your tear glands are primarily controlled by parasympathetic nerves. When emotional intensity ramps up enough to produce tears, those same nerve pathways may co-activate the vagus nerve, your body’s main parasympathetic highway.
In studies tracking heart rate and breathing during crying episodes, a clear pattern emerges. Heart rate spikes at the onset of crying, then drops quickly once tears begin flowing. Breathing slows. Parasympathetic activity increases and stays elevated for a longer period in people who cry compared to those who don’t. Meanwhile, the “fight or flight” sympathetic activity returns to baseline shortly after tears start. The net effect is that your body transitions from a stressed, activated state into something closer to recovery mode.
This parasympathetic shift likely explains why many people report feeling calmer after crying, even if their cortisol levels haven’t technically dropped. The physical experience of slowed breathing and a settling heart rate creates a genuine sense of relief that’s distinct from any chemical detox happening in the tears themselves.
Oxytocin and Natural Painkillers
Crying also triggers the release of oxytocin and endorphins, your body’s built-in painkillers. Oxytocin is often associated with bonding and comfort; endorphins produce a mild sense of well-being and can dull physical and emotional pain. Together, these chemicals help explain the soothing, slightly numb feeling that sometimes follows an intense cry.
Researchers have proposed that the self-soothing benefit of crying works through a combination of these chemical releases, the parasympathetic nervous system activation described above, and cognitive processes like reappraisal, where the act of crying helps you mentally reframe what you’re feeling. The sobbing behavior itself, with its deep, rhythmic breathing pattern, may also contribute by further stimulating parasympathetic activity.
Negative vs. Positive Emotional Tears
Not all emotional tears carry the same chemistry. A preliminary metabolomics study comparing tears shed from positive emotions (like joy) with those shed from negative emotions (like sadness or frustration) found distinct metabolic profiles. Negative emotional tears were associated with activity in brain pathways involving serotonin and GABA, two neurotransmitters central to mood regulation, as well as hormonal signaling pathways involving estrogen. This suggests your body may be doing different biological work depending on why you’re crying.
Why Crying Doesn’t Always Feel Better
If you’ve ever cried and felt worse afterward, you’re not imagining it. The self-soothing mechanism of crying depends on that parasympathetic rebound, and it doesn’t kick in reliably for everyone. Research on people with depression found that they did not show the expected increase in parasympathetic activity during the resolution of crying. In nondepressed individuals, the nervous system followed the typical pattern of ramping up calming activity as crying wound down. In depressed individuals, that recovery response was blunted or absent.
This finding suggests that depression may compromise the body’s ability to use crying as a self-regulation tool. It also helps explain why some people feel drained or stuck after crying rather than relieved. Context matters too: crying alone with no resolution to the problem that triggered it, or crying in an environment where you feel judged, tends to produce worse outcomes than crying that leads to comfort or a shift in perspective.
What This Means in Practice
The old idea that tears literally wash stress hormones out of your body is an oversimplification, but it’s rooted in something real. Emotional tears do contain stress-related hormones at higher concentrations than other types of tears. The more significant benefit, though, comes from what happens inside your body during and after crying: your nervous system shifts toward calm, your breathing slows, your heart rate drops, and your brain releases oxytocin and natural painkillers.
Suppressing tears doesn’t just block the emotional expression. It may also prevent this physiological recovery process from completing. If you feel the urge to cry and you’re in a safe place to do it, letting it happen gives your body access to a built-in mechanism for returning to equilibrium. The relief you feel afterward is not imaginary. It’s your parasympathetic nervous system doing exactly what it’s designed to do.