Dr Faye Begeti, a neurology specialist doctor at Oxford University Hospitals, says: “Crying can mark the end of an emotionally intense state and allow the brain to reset, although this experience isn’t universal and not everyone feels better after crying.”

Psychologist Dr Ritika Suk Birah says that one of the reasons why the stats show that women cry more than men can be attributed to our hormones. It’s common to feel more emotionally volatile during certain stages of our menstrual cycle, and that can cause us to cry for all kinds of reasons – both trivial and serious. “This is because fluctuations in oestrogen and progesterone can lower the threshold for emotional reactivity,” Dr Birah says. “This isn’t a failure of regulation; it’s a biological shift in emotional sensitivity. The brain becomes more responsive to emotional input, not less capable of coping”.

For the highly sensitive people (HSP) among us (an estimated one in five), there’s a biological reason for their increased tendency to break out in tears. When it comes to what’s going on inside the brains of HSP, a 2014 study, published in the journal Brain And Behaviour, found that highly sensitive individuals showed stronger activations of the “brain regions involved in awareness, integration of sensory information, empathy and preparation for action in response to emotionally evocative social stimuli”.

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