Let me describe my last week for you. I’d been waking up way too early for work — and by early, I mean 5:30 a.m. early. I was too broke to afford a holiday because I promised my parents I would be self-sufficient this summer. I freaked out that one of my high school friends unfollowed my private account and hated me. I missed my best friend because I hadn’t spoken to her. I fought with my boyfriend because I hadn’t spoken to him. My period was late, I burned my dinner yet again and the train home kept getting delayed. 

All in all, it wasn’t the kind of week I would post about on Instagram. Yet I tried to breeze through it, pretending that nothing was wrong and I was a strong, independent working woman. But in reality, all I wanted was to curl up into a ball, hug my mom and cry. While I subbed my mom’s hug with one from my concerned new roommate, I did cry — for a while.

Daily headlines, sent straight to your inbox.

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest at and around USC.

And it was fantastic. I can’t say that life was instantly rainbows and sunshine and I was skipping to work the next morning — or should I say the next “dawn,” because I am always up before the sun is — but I felt much better. So much so that I wondered why I didn’t cry more often. 

Don’t worry; my lack of frequent tears doesn’t stem from the toxic “crying is for the weak” mentality, but I just saw it as a pointless task. I believed it had no concrete result, and as Little Miss Always Productive, I felt I should focus on finding an actual solution instead of wasting my time. But in this situation where everything went wrong, I could do little to solve the problems or change anything. (I know you think I could have prevented my food from burning, but I swear my stove hates me.)

As someone who has this obsessive need to control every tiny aspect of my life, it spiraling out of my control was too much to handle. I needed to desperately let out all the anxiety, frustration and sadness; crying was my outlet to do so and feel better. Even studies show that crying helps us self-soothe because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which reduces our stress, helps us rest and induces positive emotions. A research paper titled “Is crying a self-soothing behavior?” states that crying is associated with increased oxytocin, a hormone that reduces stress and alleviates moods. Thus, crying is clearly a good mechanism to release toxic emotions, rather than keeping them buried inside. 

Now, I am not advocating that you cry all the time, because then there would be no difference between you and the annoying baby everyone avoids sitting next to on the plane. But when you are overwhelmed by all your problems and you need a moment to let all of your emotions out, crying can be helpful. 

There will always be problems, and as we get closer to adulthood, many of them will be out of our control. Take college, for example — you can’t control if you have a bad professor who assigns a lot of homework or an inconsiderate roommate who plays their terrible music out loud or you just miss the pedestrian timer for the crosswalk. The best solution at these points would be to accept that you can’t do anything about it and move on, but moving on takes time and effort. In the meantime, crying isn’t a bad option to deal with your emotions. 

I know that as I prepare for another hectic semester at college, there are going to be a lot of times the chaos will overwhelm me. While I try to deal with it and not succumb to the pressure, I know there’s no shame or harm in crying once in a while. It might just be the release I need to move forward.