First your eyes start to burn. Then your throat tightens and your face gets hot. And then comes the realization that other people are watching you cry.
Tears rarely consult your calendar: They arrive during performance reviews, tough conversations, uncomfortable medical appointments, and other moments when you’d much rather schedule them for later, in private. Fortunately, psychologists say there are ways to interrupt the process—or at least turn down the intensity—without pretending you’re fine.
“Even as a therapist, there are definitely times where you’re like, ‘OK, shoot, I need to keep it together,’” says Juliet Kuehnle, a therapist in Charlotte, N.C. She calls that “adaptive suppression.” “It’s intentional, it’s short-term, it’s situational.”
Crying isn’t entirely under your conscious control. It involves a complex interplay of brain, bodily, and emotion-regulation processes—which helps explain why a stern internal “absolutely not” doesn’t reliably work.
Kuehnle describes crying as “a release valve for your nervous system.” “Crying is sort of your body’s permission to let go,” she says. In one small lab study, women’s heart rates rose just before and as they began to cry, then quickly returned to baseline. Their breathing slowed, too. The findings suggest that crying can begin amid heightened arousal, then become part of the body’s shift back toward calm.
Here’s how to tamp down on your tears when they come at an inconvenient time.
Don’t wait until the tears are already rolling. Your best chance of postponing them is to act during the early warning period, when your eyes are just starting to sting or your breathing begins to change. “Once someone starts, it’s hard to pull it back,” says Lauren Bylsma, an associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh who studies crying. “It’s always easier to pull back emotions when they’re in that earlier, more mild stage.”
Your emotional starting point matters, too. If you slept terribly, got into a fight with your partner before work, or are already juggling six other stressors, it might not take much to tip you into tears. “If you’re already overwhelmed with everything else going on, then it just might be harder,” Bylsma says.
In the heat of the moment, start by slowing your breathing. “My favorite is an extended exhale,” Kuehnle says. You might breathe in for four counts, hold for seven, and exhale for eight—or simply focus on breathing out slowly. “The important thing is that long exhale,” she says. Another option is two quick inhales through your nose followed by one long exhale through your mouth. The goal is to lower your level of physiological arousal before the tears gain momentum.
If you’re somewhere you can get away with it—muted on Zoom, for example—Kuehnle also suggests humming, which can have a calming effect. “Those Gregorian chanters were onto something,” she says.
If you know you’re an easy crier, practice slow breathing regularly so it’s easier to access when you need it. Tracy King, a clinical psychologist in England, compares it to building strength at the gym. “You have to build stamina, ” she says.
The fear of crying can become its own emotional event. You notice tears forming, imagine everyone else noticing, and start panicking about what they’ll think of you. Now you’re upset about being upset, which raises your arousal even more and makes the tears harder to stop.
“The key is to stay out of your head and try to remain in your body,” King says. Interrupt the panic by directing your attention toward neutral sensory details. Put both feet on the floor, and notice the pressure of the chair beneath you or the texture of its fabric under your hands. Narrate a few facts to yourself: The carpet is gray. The chair feels cool. I can hear the air conditioner. If possible, take a sip of water.
You can also name the emotion to yourself: I’m overwhelmed. I feel powerless. Or simply: I feel bad right now. Identifying what’s happening can make the experience feel less mysterious and help you regain enough composure to decide what you need next. You might remind yourself: I’m having this feeling. I’m going to tend to it after this meeting is over. As Kuehnle puts it, “You’re telling your brain and body, ‘I’m going to get to you.’”
Sometimes it’s most helpful to find a convenient reason to pop out of the situation, even briefly. Excuse yourself to the restroom, splash water on your face, and move around for a minute. “Your nervous system can feel very trapped if you’re sitting in a meeting,” King says. “Getting up and going to the loo—just having a bit of movement—can be really helpful.”
Other times, holding back tears is a form of self-protection. Kuehnle recently had to put that idea into practice during an unpleasant doctor’s appointment. One thought kept looping through her mind: If I cry, I lose. She felt the familiar urge to apologize, then caught herself. “I was like, ‘Wait, I have nothing to be sorry for—and actually, you’re the one who should be sorry, because your bedside manner is terrible,’” she says. She ended up telling him: “This is all so overwhelming.”
She saved the tears for a place where she felt safer. That’s the difference between postponing an emotion and pretending it never happened. Adaptive suppression is “intentional, it’s short-term, it’s situational,” Kuehnle says—and it comes with a plan to deal with what happened later.
Sometimes these techniques will fail. If it’s obvious that you’re becoming emotional, acknowledging the moment might be more calming than mounting a cover-up.
King once became unexpectedly overwhelmed while speaking at a conference. She focused on someone she knew in the audience and said, “Could you bear with me a minute? I just feel a bit strange.”
Simply putting it out there helped. She paused, regained her footing, and continued speaking. “That cuts through that secondary layer of, ‘What are people going to think of me?’” King says. “You’re taking back agency.”
A short acknowledgement—“Give me a minute”—puts you back in charge: You’ve named what’s happening and told everyone what you’re going to do next.
Resist the urge to apologize. Crying is a human response, not an offense you’ve committed against everyone around you. If you feel compelled to say something after you’ve collected yourself, King suggests replacing “I’m sorry” with “Thank you for bearing with me.”
“What we’re trying to do is move out of shame and into some sort of gratitude,” she says. “It’s the shift that we’re trying to make.”
You don’t necessarily owe anyone an explanation, either. Crying is “fundamentally an attachment behavior,” Kuehnle says—a “bid for connection or care,” even if that bid is subconscious. If someone is giving you painful feedback, for example, your reaction might already make perfect sense—and speak for itself. Your tears might also tell the other person something they needed to know: Perhaps their tone is unnecessarily harsh, or they need to pause and approach the conversation differently.
Of course, not everyone will respond thoughtfully. That can make an already difficult moment feel even worse—but it doesn’t make the feeling wrong. Whatever reaction you receive, King says, remember: “You’re never in the wrong for feeling what you feel.”
Delaying tears is one thing; refusing to acknowledge what upset you is another. If you tell yourself you’ll deal with the emotion later, keep that promise. “Sometimes someone says something in a meeting that makes you feel quite small, and then you get on with your day,” King says. “It doesn’t really come to mind again, but your body remembers that.”
Returning to the feeling doesn’t necessarily mean crying. Tears aren’t automatically cathartic; whether they leave you feeling better depends partly on the situation and how other people respond.
You don’t need to force yourself to cry on a schedule, either. “One person called me and was like, ‘Should I set up a time each day where I force myself to cry?’” Bylsma recalls. “I was like, ‘No, that’s not how it works.’”
There’s no universally correct amount of crying, and more isn’t necessarily healthier. “There’s not a normal amount,” Bylsma says. “It’s OK that some people cry more and some people cry less. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you unless it’s causing a problem for you.”
However you choose to revisit what happened, the goal is to give the emotion somewhere to go. “It’s healthy to find a place to express your emotions, whether it’s by yourself or with your friends or your therapist,” Bylsma says. “Crying is just one piece of that.”
