Crying can make you live longer

Press, 4 September 1989, Page 16

Crying can make you live longer

JULIA SPAIN

explains just why a good cry can work

v'-'-*-**** J. 1 JUOV C* gl/VVI VI j van wvin. wonders at certain moments of stress.

With a couple of crunches in two days to his prized sets of wheels — his $240,000 Aston Martin one day, his beloved $22,000 motorbike next — no wonder Britain's Viscount Linley was fuming ,and shouting for blood. It would have done him more good to cry — and get rid of his anger the watery way. Jesus wept. So did Dr Johnson, Napoleon, and Late Sir Winston Churchill. President John F. Kennedy wasn’t past a tear or two, and evangelist Billy Graham regularly lets loose during emotional campaigns. Dr William Frey, director of the Psychiatry Research Laboratory Medical Centre, in Minnesota, says, “There’s a change in the body when it’s under stress — like David Linley’s two recent motor crunches — and glands release certain substances into the bloodstream.

“We very likely feel better after crying because our tears may be washing away the chemicals built up bodily as a result of our emotions.”

Experts say that instead of crying, when they feel like it, men too often bottle up their frustrations and distress. It helps men get more ulcers than women, and contributes to the theory why they don’t live as long as women. With several motoring convictions for speed behind him, it has raised the question in some circles 1

“why is Viscount Linley hellbent on speeding through life?” Some reply that it’s Viscount Linley’s way of shedding his frustration and distress. Until Victorian times British men wept buckets to express their sadness or happiness. But Victorian restraint commanded that crying was unmanly — keep a stiff upper lip.

“What an unnatural attitude,” declares, Dr Trudy Kapphan, at her Zurich clinic on the fashionable Birchstrasse.

"The British stiff upper lip is also very dangerous, thankfully we are seeing the silly tradition being gradually broken down.” We see men cry on the sportsfield, a significant factor in sportsmen, whose masculinity is taken for granted. Not. to weep is a foolish attitude, claims a growing medical lobby. The ability to weep distinguishes men from the animals. If it’s all right to laugh when showing pleasure, why not cry buckets to express frustrations, distress, or relief?

Choking back tears when you’re distressed slows your digestion, raises you blood pressure, speeds your heart rate. It is one of the primary causes of backache, various allergies, headache and nightmares. Apart from relieving tension, tears are really amazing things. Tears shed in anger or sorrow are different in composition from those caused by

onions or smog or other irritants. \ Chemical > changes in tears can tell doctors what is making someone ill. Tears contain one of the body’s most powerful germ killers, lysozyme. Every time we cry, we carry out a large disinfecting job on our eyes, nose, and throat.

Even if they could burst into tears every time they felt like it, men still wouldn’t cry as often as women. Women’s emotions are much more easily brought into play, and many of their tears are the result of a poignant situation.

Women will face up stoically to difficult or dangerous situations without a whimper, then burst into floods of tears when it’s all over. Women seldom cry when . giving birth, but they often do when the baby is put into their arms. A mother is not so likely to cry when the police are out hunting for her lost child as she is when the child is brought home.

Psychiatrists say it is often words or acts of kindness that can switch on a woman’s tears.

We cry most from sadness or grief, followed by loneliness, unhappiness or happiness, fear, pain, anger, sexual joy, laughter, irritating chemicals or foreign objects in the eye, and hormonal imbalances. — COPYRIGHT DUO