Teorinfo ~ In the 1600s, the most widely held theory about why we cry was that emotions (especially love) warm our hearts and eventually produce steam. To cool it back, steam from the liver will rise to the head, thicken the eye area and come out as tears.
Of course, this theory is not valid. However, is there anyone around you who still believes in this? There are three types of tears that we produce. Namely basal tears, reflexes, and psychics. Basal tears are tears that keep our corneas lubricated, so the eyes don’t dry out too much.
Reflex tears help us wash our eyes from irritation caused by foreign particles or steam, for example, from onions. And finally, the tears that we all know very well, namely psychic tears or crying tears.
These tears result from a response to strong emotions such as stress, satisfaction, anger, and sadness and suffering to physical pain. Psychic tears contain a natural painkiller called leucine enkephalin.
Which is probably the reason why we feel better after crying. With an emotional stimulus such as when we break up with a boyfriend, tears will produce.
Something called the lacrimal system around our eyeballs is a secretory system that produces tears and an excretory system that excretes them.
When tears are produced by the lacrimal gland, which is between the eyeball and our eyelids, we automatically blink and make the tears produced spread over the entire surface of the eye like a layer of glass.
The tears fall out or are filtered by something called the lacrimal punctum (like water in a sink). Then it drains through the nose, which happens to be the reason why our noses run when we cry.
In fact, crying actually affects many parts of our bodies. For example, when we cry, our heart rate will increase, we will sweat, our breath will slow down, and we will feel like a lump in our throat known as a globus sensation.
This all occurs because the sympathetic nervous system is activated in response to an emotional situation. By the way, have you often heard the stereotype that women cry more than men?
Some studies suggest that the possible cause is testosterone, which is thought to block crying. But, at the same time, the hormone prolactin, which is higher in women, actually supports it.
