It’s easy to find yourself being overwhelmed by everything that’s going on in your life. Even if you have a million good things going on, that’s still a million good things happening to you all at once. Your brain and body can only handle so much stress, whether it’s good stress or bad stress it is still taking its toll on you and you have to learn how to cope with it.

Coping isn’t always an easy thing to do, and a lot of us aren’t taught what tools we need to cope properly. I’m majoring in psychology and I still struggle to find the right coping mechanisms sometimes, especially after living so much of my life using the wrong ones. One thing that I think we all tend to overlook, though, is how helpful a good cry can be. It might sound silly, but I’m serious. There have been times when everything feels like it's collapsing around me and there is just too much to do and not enough time to do it and my body and brain just don’t want to work together. Sometimes I have a long period of days that feel like that and as much as I try to suck it up and barrel through it, that’s not always something I can effectively pull off. I’m only human, after all, and as humans we deserve to express our feelings instead of feeling forced to bottle them up all the time.

Crying isn’t always easy, though. And it doesn’t always feel like you can cry about everything all at once. I know that I go through spells where if I start crying about all of my “big” stressors, then I probably won’t stop crying about them. Times like those are when I find myself crying about “little” stressors, things that wouldn’t make the average person (or me on a good day) break down in tears.

I’m sure that this has happened to you, too. Every time you find yourself crying over something seemingly insignificant, that’s your system telling you that it’s time to let out some pent-up emotions that you haven’t been addressing. I’ve cried over my coffee order coming out wrong, which seems totally ridiculous, but it was also at a time when I was trying to ignore my depressive symptoms and the mental and physical stress my body was under because of working extra hours at work and dealing with a good handful of assignments at school that had me up into the small hours of the morning.

My last pen running out of ink or my headphones breaking have made me more upset than they should have on days when my emotional reserves are already empty, but I’m slowly teaching myself that instead of beating myself up for getting worked up and upset over little things, I should take a deep breath and try to figure out what bigger things are happening in my life-picture that have brought me to this point.

This is a tool that I think everyone could benefit from having in their arsenal. Some days we’re just in a bad mood and every inconvenience makes it worse, but there’s a difference between being in a bad mood and getting upset over little things, and getting upset over little things because you’re in denial about the big things that you should be addressing. I’ll be the first to say that I understand there isn’t always time and energy available to address all the big things at once. Trust me, I get it. But tackling one big thing at a time will reduce the number of times all the little stressors in life get the better of us. Not all of the big stressors need to be dealt with all at once. My problem is that I hate thinking about dealing with the big stressors so I ignore them and I end up forcing myself to deal with them all at once (this goes back to the unhealthy coping mechanisms I mentioned earlier). So I understand that it’s a tough cycle to break.

As tough as it is, though, it’s worthwhile to work on it. As a species, humans need to get better at being in-tune with what their bodies and emotions are trying to tell them. If you’re crying for “no reason”, I can almost guarantee that there actually is a reason and you’re just unwilling to accept it because it means addressing some uncomfortable stuff. But if you never address the uncomfortable stuff and the big stressors, you’ll never be able to move past them. So next time you find yourself upset about the little things, take a deep breath and address the little things and cry if you need to, but also think about the big things that you can start chipping away at so that you can be a happier and more stable you.