If I could have a dollar for every time in 26 years I've heard a client…or friend…or relative…say they don't cry, or can't remember the last time they did…I'd have so much money, even in the midst of this financial crisis, I wouldn't have to write this blog to pay my mortgage.
We as a culture have this"thing" about tears. We're not supposed to have them, because if we do, we believe, we're weak in character.
Guess what? Tears are a very important part of our physiology. When analyzed, they are very high in cortisol, one of the stress hormones. Tears are the body's way of clearing out stress hormones when they get so high they have potential to do serious physical damage. If we couldn't cry, stress might kill us a lot more quickly than it already does.
Years ago, when I first had this business, I was under contract to write a textbook. Numberous delays on the publisher's ended created backups and backlogs that, through a domino effect, crushed my business plan just as I was starting to see a return on my investment. To this day, I tell people I felt like I was in an old"Roadrunner" cartoon, standing on top of a cliff, watching my business fall to the ground like the cartoon anvil, with a momentum so powerful there was nothing that was going to stop it. All I could do was sit there and watch it happen, wait until the cloud of dust from the impact settled, and then start to rebuild my dream.
Talk about stress. A lot of what happened reflected on me, because it was my name that ultimately showed up on the cover. Like anyone, I value the brand I've created for my name, and it was pretty devastating to watch events completely out of my control chip away at that brand's reputation.
It was ironic that at the very time all of this was happening, I was researching a concept called"restraint stress", which is the kind of stress any animal experiences when it perceives that it is locked into a situation with no way out. In the laboratory, restraint stress is researched by immobilizing rats and subjecting them to electrical foot shocks. After repeatedly experiencing these shocks, these rats develop a behavior called"learned helplessness", which is essentially giving up even trying to escape their dilemma, and instead just sitting there and passively allowing themselves to be subjected to discomfort.
In a way, it helped to be researching this, because at least in my head, I knew that the very worst thing I could do was follow in the footsteps of those rats. I had to make sure, that every single day, even if it was something small, I had to do something that moved me forward.
I can tell you now that I am many years past the initial crisis, that there were days when getting out of bed was the something small that I managed to do.
Most days I could motivate to make coffee, and then the rest of my energy was devoted to being as engaging as I could with anyone I needed to interact with.
Sometimes the smallest thing would just push me over the edge. And a lot of times, when I wasn't feeling sad at all, usually in a very inopportune moment like when I was in the checkout line at the grocery store, tears would appear out of nowhere.
Honestly, it felt great to cry. What was really hard was dealing with the reactions of people who were around me when the tears came. They usually wanted to hover, comfort, make them go away. And that put me in a position of having to take the energy I needed to take care of myself, and put it into taking care of the people who thought they were taking care of me, but who were really making their discomfort with my stress, my responsibility.
I realized that it is probably this discomfort we have with tears that makes many of us shove them back into our heads when we feel like letting them flow.
Why am I telling all of you this? Well, it's interesting. I started to tell you because tears have come up in more than one counseling session recently, and I've shared the tears and cortisol fun fact. I thought, since cortisol can wreak havoc on PCOS and fertility, that it might be a good idea to put that fun fact on this blog.
But as I was writing this, I realized that in recent weeks I've heard many, many stories from friends who are losing jobs, freaking out, experiencing losses both personal and financial, that are leaving them feeling like those tied down rats.
Just wanted to tell you, first of all, if you feel like crying, it's ok. It might be the best thing you can do for yourself today, to do just that. It also means you're human. And that your brain is working, doing exactly what it's supposed to do when you're stressed and it's starting to put you at risk.
For what it's worth, the times my life has been thrown into the greatest of upheavals have also been the times when the land needed to be cleared, so to speak, for newer, bigger, and better things. I just had to stop resisting it and let the momentum go where it needed to go. When I was standing on the cliff, thinking the momentum was downward because all I could see was that anvil, I should have been looking up and forward. There were amazing things coming that the anvil was making room for.
I encourage all of you, if you've been feeling like it but resisting it, to have a good cry. Then get some sleep. And marvel at the fact that no matter what happened today, the sun will come up tomorrow.
Have a great week!