Crying spells are episodes of crying that feel sudden, intense, or difficult to control, often seeming out of proportion to whatever triggered them. They differ from ordinary crying because they can strike without an obvious cause, feel impossible to stop once they start, and may leave you confused about why you’re crying at all. While everyone cries, frequent or unexplained crying spells often signal something deeper going on, whether that’s a hormonal shift, a mental health condition, or a neurological issue.
What Makes a Crying Spell Different From Normal Crying
Normal crying is a response that matches a situation. You cry at a funeral, during a painful breakup, or watching a sad movie. A crying spell, by contrast, feels disconnected. It might hit you in the middle of a work meeting, while driving, or during an otherwise pleasant evening. The hallmark is a sense that the tears are running the show rather than you choosing to let them out.
Interestingly, research on crying and depression has challenged the assumption that depressed people simply cry more often. In one study that exposed depressed and non-depressed participants to a standardized cry-inducing stimulus, depressed individuals were no more likely to cry than anyone else. The difference was in what happened during the tears. Non-depressed participants who cried showed clear emotional activation: increased sadness, facial expressions of grief, and measurable changes in heart rate and skin conductance. Depressed participants who cried showed much less of this activation. Their bodies went through the motions of crying without the usual emotional signature behind it. This disconnect, crying without the expected emotional engine, may be one reason crying spells in depression feel so confusing and unsettling.
What Happens in Your Brain and Body
Emotional crying is controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system, the same branch of your nervous system that handles “rest and digest” functions. Your tear glands are wired primarily to parasympathetic nerves, which stimulate tear production through chemical signals. But the process isn’t purely calm. The onset of a crying spell actually involves a surge of sympathetic (fight-or-flight) activity, the same system that spikes your heart rate during stress. As crying resolves, parasympathetic activity increases, which is part of why many people feel a sense of relief or exhaustion after a good cry.
The brain structures involved include areas responsible for processing emotions, evaluating threats, and regulating your body’s automatic responses. The amygdala, a key emotional processing center, plays a central role. It communicates with regions that control mood regulation, and when those regulatory systems are weakened by stress, hormonal changes, or illness, the threshold for triggering tears drops. You cry more easily because the brain’s emotional braking system isn’t working at full capacity.
Depression and Anxiety
Depression is the most commonly associated cause of unexplained crying spells. But it’s worth noting that the relationship is more nuanced than “depression makes you cry more.” As the research above suggests, depression can actually flatten your emotional responses while still producing tears. This means you might cry frequently yet feel emotionally numb, a combination that can be deeply disorienting.
Anxiety disorders can also trigger crying spells, particularly when stress accumulates over time. Chronic worry taxes the brain’s mood-regulation systems, and crying becomes the overflow valve. Generalized anxiety, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress can all produce episodes where tears arrive suddenly and feel disproportionate to the moment.
Hormonal Shifts and Crying
Estrogen has a direct influence on the brain circuits that regulate mood, stress reactivity, and emotional processing. When estrogen levels drop, as they do premenstrually and during perimenopause, the brain becomes more reactive to negative emotional information and less effective at managing stress. Specifically, low estrogen reduces activity in brain regions that normally keep emotional responses in check, while the amygdala becomes more active and reactive. The result is a window of heightened vulnerability where stressors that you’d normally handle fine can trigger intense emotional responses, including crying spells.
This isn’t just a mood effect. Low estrogen also reduces the brain’s responsiveness to serotonin, a chemical messenger critical to emotional stability. After menopause, serotonin responsivity drops measurably and can be restored with estrogen treatment. During low-estrogen phases of the menstrual cycle, women show greater negative mood responses to stress and have more difficulty suppressing negative memories, creating a cycle where emotional triggers hit harder and linger longer.
Postpartum Crying
After childbirth, the distinction between “baby blues” and postpartum depression matters. Baby blues typically begin within 2 to 3 days after delivery and can last up to two weeks. Crying spells during this period are extremely common and driven largely by the dramatic hormonal crash following birth. Postpartum depression is different: symptoms usually develop within the first few weeks after giving birth but can appear during pregnancy or up to a year after delivery. Left untreated, postpartum depression can last many months or longer. If crying spells persist beyond that initial two-week window or come with feelings of hopelessness, inability to care for your baby, or thoughts of self-harm, that’s a different situation from the blues.
Pseudobulbar Affect: Crying Without the Emotion
Pseudobulbar affect (PBA) is a neurological condition where crying (or laughing) episodes happen suddenly and don’t match how you’re actually feeling. You might burst into tears during a casual conversation, or laugh uncontrollably at something that isn’t funny, then shift to crying mid-episode. The episodes are typically brief, lasting only a few minutes, but they’re impossible to suppress.
PBA results from damage to the brainstem pathways that connect emotional processing to facial expression. It occurs in people with neurological conditions like stroke, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, ALS, or Parkinson’s disease. The key distinction from depression is that with PBA, you feel emotions normally. You just can’t control when or how intensely they show up on your face and in your voice. People with PBA also don’t typically have the sleep problems, appetite changes, or persistent sadness that characterize depression.
Managing a Crying Spell in the Moment
When a crying spell starts, your sympathetic nervous system is already activated. Grounding techniques work by redirecting your brain’s attention away from the emotional cascade and toward sensory input, which helps engage the parasympathetic system and calm things down.
- The 5-4-3-2-1 technique: Name 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 you can taste. This forces your brain to shift from emotional processing to sensory observation.
- Structured breathing: Box breathing (inhale for 4 counts, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4) or 4-7-8 breathing (inhale for 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8) directly stimulate the parasympathetic system.
- Clenching and releasing your fists: Squeeze your hands tightly for several seconds, then release. This gives the physical tension of the stress response somewhere to go and creates a noticeable contrast of relaxation when you let go.
- Simple stretching: Rolling your neck, stretching your arms overhead, or pulling each knee to your chest shifts your body out of the hunched, collapsed posture that accompanies crying and changes the physical signals your brain is receiving.
These techniques won’t address the underlying cause, but they can help you regain composure when a spell hits at an inconvenient time.
Longer-Term Treatment
Because crying spells are a symptom rather than a condition, treatment depends on what’s driving them. For depression and anxiety, cognitive behavioral therapy is the most studied approach, helping you identify and interrupt the thought patterns that feed emotional dysregulation. Relaxation techniques, biofeedback, and meditation can also reduce overall stress reactivity, raising the threshold for triggering a spell.
For PBA specifically, a combination medication of dextromethorphan and quinidine is the only treatment specifically approved for the condition, though antidepressants are also used to reduce episode frequency. For hormonally driven crying spells, addressing the underlying hormonal shift, whether through lifestyle changes during PMS or hormone therapy during perimenopause, can make a significant difference. The common thread across all of these causes is that frequent, uncontrollable crying spells are treatable once the root cause is identified.