feelings Archives | Neel Burton

What Our Tears Are Trying to Tell Us

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who never ate his bread with tears doesn’t know what life tastes like.
—after Goethe

In many cultures, especially for men, crying is considered to be undignified and infantile behaviour, except in certain specific circumstances such as mourning the loss of a relative. After childhood, men shed tears much less frequently than women. The reasons for this are partly biological, but mainly sociocultural.

‘Crying’, or ‘tearing up’, is not just one thing. There are in fact three types of tear, two of which are rather uninteresting: basal tears that lubricate and protect the eye, and reflex tears that flush out irritants such as smoke particles or onion vapours. The third type of tear is, of course, shed in response to emotion.

Crocodile Tears

Whereas many animals have basal and reflex tears, emotional tears appear to be uniquely human. Although other animals, of course, vocalise and express distress, there is no convincing evidence that they shed tears for emotional reasons. So, presumably, if women cry more often than men, it is because they are more human? Elephants and chimpanzees are sometimes said to ‘weep’, but it has not been conclusively demonstrated that these are indeed emotional tears. On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that crocodiles don’t sob. The expression ‘to shed crocodile tears’ has its roots in an ancient legend, according to which crocodiles pretend to weep to either lure or mourn their prey.

What I Remember from Med School

Reflex and emotional tears are produced by the lacrimal gland and drained through the nasolacrimal duct into the nose, which is why we also sniff when we cry. Any excess fluid spills out of the eyelid and trickles along the side of the nose or surface of the cheek, forming teardrops. Damage to the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve desensitises the cornea, impairing the production of reflex tears. However, it is the parasympathetic division of the facial nerve that is responsible for making tears, and damage to the facial nerve, as in Bell’s palsy, can lead to a decrease in tear production.

Existential Tears

When we think of crying emotional tears, we think of sadness and grief. But we also shed emotional tears in response to a range of other, sometimes positive, emotions and feelings, including elation, laughter, love, frustration, pain, anger, and surprise. We may also cry in response to music, beauty, kindness, yearning, reunion, or anything that strikes us as poignant. What all these instances of crying have in common is not sadness, but significance.

Social Tears

Crying is not merely a private affair. Tears may serve a number of social functions. In particular, they may serve to convey our emotions while emphasising their depth and sincerity; draw attention, sympathy, and assistance at a time of danger, distress, or need; and serve as a signal of appeasement, dependency, or attachment. If someone cries in our presence, it is almost impossible not to be moved, even changed, by that. No surprise, then, that tears can also be used to manipulate and deceive. The younger you are, the better you know this.

Healthy Tears

In ancient and mediaeval times, physicians believed that crying purged excess humours from the body. This idea survives in the modern scientific notion that emotional tears serve to excrete stress-related substances such as ACTH. But the more important purgation is, of course, psychological.

Crying may help us to feel better, in particular, by enabling us to experience, express, and ‘process’ our emotions. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that tragedy, by arousing emotions such as pity and fear, brings about a catharsis—a purgation or purification—of such emotions. After crying, we may feel not better exactly, but differently: calmer, clearer, more reconciled to life, or simply more certain of who we are and where we stand.

Crying as a Way of Knowing

Emotional tears signal moments that are of existential importance in our lives. They tell us that something matters deeply. Sometimes we know what that something is—the death of a parent, the birth of a child—but at other times our tears seem to know before we do, and to arrive bearing a message.

Imagine that a relationship or friendship has broken down. Three months later, or even three years later, you sit down on a park bench and unexpectedly begin to cry. Those tears tell you something that you may not have known, something that you may have been guarding against: that you still miss the relationship, and that it mattered more than you realised. The tragedy is when the other person also has their park bench moment, but neither of you acts upon it.

Thirty years, gone like that.

We do not always cry because we know what matters to us. Sometimes we know what matters to us because we cry. In this sense, crying can be a way of knowing, revealing deeper truths that reason, thought, and language cannot reach. It sometimes happens that we cry without quite knowing why. When that happens, we should ask ourselves: What does this mean? What is the more refined part of me trying to tell me?

What brings us to tears changes as we change. A child might cry because they are underwhelmed by their Christmas presents. The sadness is real because, at that age, the presents really do matter. As we mature, the objects of our tears change along with our hierarchy of values. We cry less at the frustration of our immediate desires, and more at an unexpected kindness, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, an abstract value like dignity or freedom, or the human condition.

We cry for our ex not merely because we can’t have them, but because they can’t have us.

Because without us, how on earth will they cope?

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Pain Is a Feeling but not an Emotion. Love Can Be Both.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

In brief, an emotion is an enduring psychological state, while a feeling is a conscious experience. An emotion such as love can give rise to many different feelings, while some feelings, such as pain, are not emotions at all.

‘Emotions’ and ‘feelings’ are often confused and assimilated. Even when they are distinguished, psychologists disagree about what they are. This is more than a quarrel over words. Unless we get the distinction right, we cannot meaningfully discuss our emotional lives.

What Emotions and Feelings Are Not

Many people use ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ as if they were exact synonyms. But this obscures an important distinction between an emotion and the conscious experience, or ‘feeling’, of that emotion.

Some experts go almost to the opposite extreme, defining an emotion as an automatic bodily response and a feeling as the conscious experience or interpretation of that response. But this is to confuse an emotion with its physiological manifestations. A racing heart is no more an emotion than tears are grief. The same bodily changes can accompany very different emotions, or no emotion at all, as during exercise or illness. Conversely, it is not clear that every emotion need involve appreciable bodily changes.

Other experts distinguish emotions from feelings chiefly on the basis of consciousness, treating an emotion as unconscious and a feeling as its conscious counterpart. This is much closer to the mark, but still conflates an emotion with the experience of that emotion—and leaves unexplained the many feelings, such as hunger and pain, that are not emotions at all.

Much of the confusion arises because behind these two words lie not two concepts but four: emotional experiences, emotions or sentiments, traits, and feelings. If you’re a philosopher and didn’t want to get hung up on words, you could just call them A, B, C, and D.

The Example of Pride

If I say, ‘I am grateful’, I could mean one of three things: that I am currently feeling grateful for something; that I generally feel grateful for that thing; or that I am a grateful kind of person.

Similarly, if I say, ‘I am proud’, I could mean that I am currently feeling proud about something, that I generally feel proud about that thing, or that I am a proud kind of person.

Let’s agree to call the first instance (currently feeling proud about something) an emotional experience, the second instance (generally feeling proud about that thing) an emotion or sentiment, and the third instance (being a proud kind of person), a trait.

It is common to confuse these three instances, especially the first and the second. But whereas an emotional experience is brief and episodic, an emotion—which may or may not result from accreted emotional experiences—can perdure for many years, and, in that time, predispose to a variety of emotional experiences, as well as thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions. For instance, love can give rise not only to amorous feelings, but also to joy, grief, rage, longing, and jealousy, among others.

That’s why we can tell someone that we love them even while we are furious with them. In fact, the fury, which is the emotional experience, may arise out of the love, which is the enduring emotion. Whereas if love existed solely when we were consciously feeling it, we would fall in and out of love many times a day.

So What Is the Difference Between a Feeling and an Emotion?

Now that we have our terminology in place, we are in a much better position to distinguish between an emotion and a feeling.

An emotional experience, by virtue of being a conscious experience, is necessarily a feeling, as are physical sensations such as hunger, fullness, or pain.

Notice, however, that not all conscious experiences are also feelings, not, for example, believing or seeing—presumably because they lack a somatic, or bodily, dimension.

In contrast, an emotion, being in some sense latent, can only ever be felt, sensu stricto, through the emotional experiences to which it gives rise, even though it may also be discovered through its associated thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions.

Thus, every emotional experience is a feeling, but not every feeling is an emotional experience. Pain is a feeling but not an emotion. Love can be both: we can be feeling love in the moment as a conscious emotional experience, while more enduringly being ‘in love’.

This is also why a feeling cannot simply be an interpretation of bodily changes: we do not have to interpret pain for it to hurt.

Now Let’s Start Talking

Now that we are conceptually clear about emotions, emotional experiences, feelings, and traits, we can start talking about our emotional lives without contradicting ourselves at every turn.

For example, because emotions need not themselves be conscious, some emotions, such as hating one’s mother or coveting one’s same-sex friend, might only be recognised after several years in psychotherapy.

If an emotion remains unconscious, this is often by repression or some more elaborate form of self-deception which builds upon repression.

Self-deception can also take place at the level of an emotional experience, commonly by misrepresenting the type or intensity of the emotional experience or misattributing its object or cause. Thus, envy is often construed as indignation, and Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others) as sympathy. Fear of ghosts or ‘the dark’ is almost certainly fear of death, since people who have come to terms with death are hardly afraid of such things.

Thus, we can feel something without knowing quite what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, or even whom or what we are really feeling it about.

Emotions as Ways of Seeing

Beyond this, it could be argued that even the purest and most accurate of emotions is inherently self-deceptive in so far as it lends weight in our experience to one thing, or some things, over others, thereby clouding our perspective and the ‘bigger picture’. In that much, emotions are not objective or neutral perceptions, but subjective ‘ways of seeing’ that reflect our particular, contingent needs and preoccupations.

The lover notices what every other overlooks; the coward sees danger where another finds opportunity. To understand our emotions—and the relations between A, B, C, and D—is not merely to understand how we feel, but how we see the world—and ourselves in it.