Crying: 'Did you know?'

Resource: Tears the science and some art.

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Collaboration: 'Caring About Crying'

Thanks to

Kristina Adams Waldorf, MD

, for yesterday’s article Sweet Relief. I’m passing the baton directly from Kristina to

Mariah Friend

.

Day 14 of this Caring for Crying collaboration, and I’m so impressed by the insights, comments and experiences shared by everyone, not just the team.

If you haven’t dropped by the AWC Discussion thread (AWC Town Bulletin - On Crying’) I recommend reading through the comments exchanged

I’m writing up some of my insights to share at the end of the collaboration. Don’t forget there will be a discussion thread on September 28th to share your insights.

There’s an open invitation for anyone wishing to contribute a piece to this collaboration:

We Invite You to 'Care About Crying'

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[Email publishing this article shared via the Website on Sept 2nd. AKA I’m using Plan B because I didn’t have as much writing time as I thought this week!]

‘Collaboration: Caring about Crying.’ Did you know?

Are all tears the same? What’s in our tears? What do they look like?

Here are a few references to satisfy your curiosity!

Contents

1. Facts About Tears

2. When we say ‘we need to cry it out’, perhaps we’re literally crying out stress!

3. Art meets Science: The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears

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1. Facts About Tears

Tears serve many purposes, and your eyes produce them all the time. You make 15 to 30 gallons of tears each year.¹

You Have More Than One Type of Tear

Tears are essential to help you see clearly and maintain the health of your eyes. They can also help communicate your emotions. Your body makes three types of tears.

Basal tears are in your eyes all the time to lubricate, nourish and protect your cornea. Basal tears act as a constant shield between the eye and the rest of the world, keeping dirt and debris away.

In healthy mammalian eyes, the cornea is continually kept wet and nourished by basal tears. They lubricate the eye and help keep it clear of dust. Tear fluid contains water, mucin, lipids, lysozyme, lactoferrin, lipocalin, lacritin, immunoglobulins, glucose, urea, sodium, and potassium. Some of the substances in lacrimal fluid (such as lysozyme) fight against bacterial infection as a part of the immune system. Lysozyme does this by dissolving a layer in the outer coating, called peptidoglycan, of certain bacteria. It is a typical body fluid with salt content similar to blood plasma. Usually, in a 24-hour period, 0.75 to 1.1 grams (0.03–0.04-ounce avoirdupois) of tears are secreted; this rate slows with age.²

Reflex tears are formed when your eyes need to wash away harmful irritants, such as smoke, foreign bodies or onion fumes. Your eyes release them in larger amounts than basal tears, and they may contain more antibodies to help fight bacteria. It can also occur with bright light and hot or peppery stimuli to the tongue and mouth. It is also linked with vomiting, coughing, and yawning

Emotional tears are produced in response to emotional states. Some scientists have proposed that emotional tears contain additional hormones and proteins not present in basal or reflex tears.

Tears Have Layers

Tears are not just saline. They have a similar structure to saliva and contain enzymes, lipids, metabolites and electrolytes. Each tear has three layers:

1. An inner mucus layer that keeps the whole tear fastened to the eye.

2. A watery middle layer (the thickest layer) to keep the eye hydrated, repel bacteria and protect the cornea.

3. An outer oily layer to keep the surface of the tear smooth for the eye to see through, and to prevent the other layers from evaporating.

How Your Body Makes Tears

Lacrimal glands above each eye produce your tears. As you blink, tears spread across the surface of the eye. Then the tears drain into puncta, tiny holes in the corners of your upper and lower eyelids. Your tears then travel through small canals in the lids and down a duct before emptying into your nose. There, tears will either evaporate or be reabsorbed.

When a lot of emotional or reflex tears are made, they overwhelm the lacrimal drainage system. That’s why these tears can spill out of your eyes, run down your cheeks and sometimes dribble out of your nose. 

You’ll Make Fewer Tears as You Get Older

Basal tear production slows with age, and this can lead to the development of dry eye. Dry eye is a common problem for people undergoing hormonal changes, especially women during pregnancy and menopause. Contact lenses and certain medications can also cause dry eye. If you have dry eye, you may also be prone to blepharitis, a common cause of irritation or swelling of the eyelids. In addition to seeing an ophthalmologist, there are many simple things you can do at home to keep your eyes moist.

2. Are we crying out our stress?

Over forty years ago, William H. Frey, II, Ph.D., examined the chemical composition of different types of tears and proposed that emotional tear secretion may serve a biological function by excreting stress-inducing hormones built up during emotional distress.

Tears brought about by emotions have a different chemical makeup than those for lubrication; emotional tears contain more of the protein-based hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and Leu-enkephalin (a natural painkiller) than basal or reflex tears. ³

perhaps the reason people feel better after crying is that they may be removing in their tears chemicals that build up during stress. So when people talk about "crying it out", this may be literally what occurs. While this is just a theory, we do know that people report feeling less sad and less angry after crying and that 85% of women and 73% of men feel better after crying. Humans are the only animals to evolve this ability to shed tears in response to emotional stress, and it is likely that crying survived the pressures of natural selection because it has some survival value. It is not only OK to cry, it is one of the things that makes us human.⁴

‘Curiouser and curiouser’, as Alice once said. (Alice in Wonderland. Chapter 2 The Pool of Tears)

If crying has survived the pressures of natural selection, perhaps we need to unlearn and relearn about this key biological process. Perhaps this is a key element of completing a stress cycle.

3. Art meets Science: The Microscopic Structures of Dried Human Tears

Photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher captures tears of grief, joy, laughter and irritation in extreme detail. (Joseph Stromberg November 13 2013.)

In 2010, photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher published a book of remarkable images that captured the honeybee in an entirely new light. By using powerful scanning electron microscopes, she magnified a bee’s microscopic structures by hundreds or even thousands of times in size, revealing startling, abstract forms that are far too small to see with the naked eye.

Now, as part of a new project called “Topography of Tears,” she’s using microscopes to give us an unexpected view of another familiar subject: dried human tears.

Rose-Lynn Fisher's The Topography of Tears

Click here for the article & Images: THE TOPOGRAPHY OF TEARS
The Topography of Tears is a visual investigation of tears that I photographed through an optical standard light microscope - a vintage Zeiss from the late 1960's or 70's, mounted with a digital microscopy camera.

I started this project in 2008 during a period marked by grief. In my abundant supply of tears, I became curious about the very nature of tears. What do tears really look? Would joy look the same as sorrow? I set out to see what I would find by looking at my tears through my microscope. The microscope provided the means to examine my tears and beyond that, to visually evoke the unseen realm of my emotions.

I photographed a range of emotional tears, mainly my own whenever I cried, along with tears from others young and old. I saved my tears onto glass slides, either allowing them to evaporate, or be compressed between glass slide and a thinner glass slip cover. The results of each approach were equally interesting to me. The air-dried tears revealed their organic structure, so similar to natural structures at every scale in nature.
The images produced by compressed tears often evoked a sense of place, like aerial views of emotional terrain.

‘The Caring About Crying Collaboration’ continues tomorrow with a Podcast.

Please ‘❤️’ LIKE the article.

The Caring About Crying Anthology. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone.

1. Sept 1 Launch article: Caring About Crying. We All Cry. You’re Not Alone By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration

2. Sept 2 & Sept 14 Crying: 'Did you know?' Resource: Tears the science and some art. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration

3. Sept 3 'Cry, Baby. Why Our Tears Matter' A Podcast Interview. Dan Harris and Dr Bianca Harris of Ten Percent Happier with Reverend Benjamin Perry. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration

4. Sept 4 ‘In Conversation with Rev. Benjamin Perry’. Victoria interviews the Author of 'Cry Baby: Why Our Tears Matter' By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration

5. Sept 5 ‘My stoic mom's parting gift: Making peace with tears’ By Sarah Coomber at Sandwich Season

6. Sept 6 We Invite You to 'Care About Crying'. By Victoria on behalf of the team.

7. Sept 6 ‘ICU Special Edition: There's Crying in Baseball?’ By  Nurse Kristin  at HCT:Heal Cure Treat

8. Sept 7 Triggered. Caring About Crying Anthology By Kristina Adams Waldorf, MD at After He Said Cancer and Anne at The Future Widow  

9. Sept 8 'Can't Cry. Want to Cry??' A Caregiver's Paradox of Human-ing. By Victoria at Carer Mentor: Empathy and Inspiration

10. Sep 9 ‘AWC Town Bulletin - On Crying’ By Tiffany Chu and Bakhtawar at Asian Writers Collective

11. Sep 10 The Healing Power of Tears By Louisa Wah at Lily Pond

12. Sept 11 My Tears are not a Grief Gauge by Anna De La Cruz at Gen Xandwich

13. Sept 13 Sweet Relief After He Said Cancer | A Memoir by Kristina Adams Waldorf, MD at After He Said Cancer 

1. American Academy of Ophthalmology

2. ."Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD 2009

3. Effect of stimulus on the chemical composition of human tears. W H Frey 2nd, D DeSota-Johnson, C Hoffman, J T McCall. Am J Ophthalmol. 1981 Oct;92(4):559-67. doi: 10.1016/0002-9394(81)90651-6.

Abstract: We examined the effect of the nature of the stimulus on the chemical composition of human tears. The protein concentration of emotional tears from women exceeded that of irritant-induced tears by 24% (P less than .01). Polyacrylamide disk gel electrophoresis disclosed no significant difference between the distribution of positively or negatively charged proteins of irritant-induced and emotional tears. Manganese concentrations in tears (30 ng/ml) exceeded serum concentrations from the same subjects by 30-fold. These manganese concentrations in tears were considerably less than previously reported values. We found no differences for the concentrations of protein or manganese in human tears between the sexes.

4. Grief and Loss by William H. Frey II, Ph.D., Director of the Alzheimer's Research Center

Crying: The Mystery of Tears. William H. Frey "Tears, idle tears," usually the stuff of poetry, become the stuff of scientific investigation for biochemist Frey, who asks here: Why do humans cry? Is crying healthy? Is there a chemical difference between tears of pain and tears of emotion? Do animals weep? Convinced that tears "hold the key to the chemistry of human emotions," Frey has conducted a variety of behavioral, psychological, genetic and chemical tests on tears. Based on his research, he concludes that crying does indeed relieve stress. This readable volume combines rigorous research with entertaining anecdotes, and a questionnaire in the back invites readers to sob for science. December Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. (Published Sept 1 1985)