Take The Time To Cry Today

Weddings are the best, they’re filled with overjoyed brides, ecstatic grooms, and confused flower girls.

I’m a bit of a cynic. I can usually expect the worse out of anything. One would imagine that at weddings, I’m not the same way. But in fact, I’m quite the opposite. Weddings are my absolute soft spot, they’re my medicine. They make the sky blues and the grass greener for me.

I’m always so overjoyed to be in a room filled with friends and families that have nothing but love for one another while reminding us all of the beautiful moments left to experience.

In fact, I get so happy that I usually end up doing a lot of happy crying. I either have to look up or down seeing as, usually, I can’t face either the bride or the groom (without turning into a crying baby that is)

Happy crying. It’s an odd and paradoxical thing. An act that notoriously represents distress can express the exact opposite.

“People can have negative expressions, but feel positive feelings,” psychologist Oriana R. Aragón, who studies emotion regulation and facial expressions, told Fatherly.

The article goes into greater detail and gives an explanation to why exactly we cry when we’re happy.

It turns out the researchers once thought that tears of joy came from latent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. However, when they tested their hypothesis, they learned that explicit and implicit measures of how people are feeling are predominantly genuine feelings. That’s right. You don’t need to be suppressed to happy-cry. Which means, good news for us overly-emotional folks.

Crying naturally intensifies life’s happiest moments. Here’s the formula: our tears release neurotransmitters known as leucine enkephalin (aka, our body's natural painkiller).

Which explains that when we’re sad, crying makes us feel better and when we’re happy, crying still makes us feel better. It’s a win-win.

You don’t even need to be at a wedding to have a genuine-happy cry. Hell, it can be while taking a lovely walk in the park, or even re-watching How I Met Your Mother. Whatever it is, make sure to take the time to happy cry today.