How to Stop Crying: What Works in the Moment and Why It Happens
How to stop crying is a fair question when the timing is wrong: mid-meeting, on a call, in front of someone you do not want to cry in front of. A few physical moves genuinely buy you a couple of minutes. This page gives you those, explains why some people cry easily, and helps you plan where the tears can go instead.
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About this tool
How to stop crying is usually asked about timing rather than about feeling. Most people are not trying to stop feeling sad. They are trying not to cry in a performance review, on a video call, during an argument, or in front of a parent who will make it about themselves. That is a reasonable thing to want, and a few physical moves really do buy you a minute or two. It is worth saying at the start that holding tears in is a short-term tool for a specific situation, not a goal to work toward, and the second half of this page is about where they go instead.
The moves that work in the moment are the ones that change your body rather than your thoughts. Many people find cold helps: cold water on the face, a cold drink, holding something cold against your wrists or the back of your neck. Cold water on the face, particularly around the eyes and upper cheeks, triggers the diving response, in which heart rate slows and attention shifts sharply to the physical sensation. Marsha Linehan built that mechanism into the distress tolerance skill known as TIPP in dialectical behavior therapy, where temperature is the first of the four components. The worksheet at TIPP Skills has the full sequence.
Breathing is the second lever. Make the out-breath longer than the in-breath, around four counts in and six or eight out, without forcing the size of the breath. The reason to go slow rather than deep is practical: crying and gasping are the same breathing pattern, and smoothing the out-breath interrupts the rhythm that carries the sob. Count the exhale under your breath. Unclench your jaw and let your tongue sit flat rather than pressed hard, because the facial tension of trying not to cry is itself part of what makes the next wave arrive.
The folk moves are worth knowing with an honest label. Pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth, looking up or at a fixed point, pinching the skin between thumb and finger, and taking twenty seconds before answering are widely passed around and have essentially no research behind them. What they share is a plausible mechanism: they occupy attention and interrupt the build-up. Several of them do work for individual people. Treat them as tricks to test on yourself rather than physiology, and keep the two that happen to work for you.
Then there is the honest limit. Sometimes the tears are coming and the best available move is to change the setting rather than the body. Ask for two minutes. Say you need water. Turn the camera off. Walking out of a room for ninety seconds costs far less than most people fear, and it costs much less than the ten minutes of trying to speak through it. If you know a particular conversation will do this, schedule it so that a gap follows rather than a meeting.
Why some people cry easily is partly dispositional. Ad Vingerhoets, whose 2013 book Why Only Humans Weep remains the main scholarly treatment of crying, documents large differences between individuals and between cultures in how often and how readily people cry, with women reporting crying more often than men across most studied countries. Elaine and Arthur Aron's work on sensory processing sensitivity, published in 1997, describes a trait found in a substantial minority of adults involving stronger responses to stimulation and to emotional material. Crying easily is a feature of that temperament rather than a fault in it, and the test at Highly Sensitive Person (Empath) Test covers the trait in more detail.
Crying easily also has ordinary causes that come and go, and those are the ones worth checking first because they are fixable. Short sleep, the week after an illness, alcohol the night before, grief in any stage, chronic stress, hormonal shifts across the menstrual cycle and in perimenopause, and some medications all lower the threshold. So does being near the end of a long stretch of holding things together. If you used to cry rarely and now cry at adverts, the question is what changed in the last few months rather than what is wrong with you.
Crying when angry has its own name and its own confusion. Frustration tears tend to arrive in situations where you feel both strongly activated and powerless: being talked over, being accused unfairly, arguing with someone who holds the power. They are frequently misread by everyone present, including you, as sadness or as weakness, and that misreading is often what makes the moment worse. Naming it internally helps more than it should: this is anger with nowhere to go, not sadness. The Feelings Wheel (Free Printable PDF) is useful afterward for separating what was anger from what was hurt underneath it.
There are times when crying is information rather than a problem to manage. Tears most days, crying that arrives with no identifiable trigger, numb flatness punctuated by sudden sobbing, or crying alongside poor sleep, loss of interest, and exhaustion can all point toward depression or burnout, and the useful response is assessment rather than better suppression technique. Grief is its own case: crying there is the process working, not a malfunction, and the aim is to find private places for it rather than to shut it down. The Depression Test on this site can help you organize those observations before an appointment.
A note on catharsis, because the internet is confident about it in both directions. Lauren Bylsma and colleagues' 2008 international study of crying episodes found that whether people felt better afterward depended heavily on context: support from others, the kind of event, and whether shame followed. So the claim that a good cry always helps is too strong, and so is the claim that crying makes everything worse. What is reasonably clear is that systematically suppressing emotion over long periods is not a comfortable way to live. Use the moves on this page when the setting demands it, and use Part 2 to make sure there is somewhere the tears are allowed.
References
- Vingerhoets AJJM. Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the Mysteries of Tears. Oxford University Press; 2013.
- Bylsma LM, Vingerhoets AJJM, Rottenberg J. When is crying cathartic? An international study. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. 2008;27(10):1165-1187.
- Gracanin A, Bylsma LM, Vingerhoets AJJM. Is crying a self-soothing behavior? Frontiers in Psychology. 2014;5:502.
- Linehan MM. DBT Skills Training Manual. 2nd ed. Guilford Press; 2014.
- Aron EN, Aron A. Sensory-processing sensitivity and its relation to introversion and emotionality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1997;73(2):345-368.
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, November 6). How to Stop Crying. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tools/how-to-stop-crying
How to Stop Crying FAQ
How do I stop crying immediately?
Change your body rather than your thoughts, because thoughts are too slow for the thirty seconds available. Cold often helps: cold water on the face, a cold drink held against your hands, something cold on the back of your neck. At the same time, lengthen the out-breath, roughly four counts in and six or eight out, without taking a huge breath. Unclench your jaw, drop your shoulders, and press your feet into the floor. If a wave is clearly coming anyway, ask for two minutes and leave the room, which costs less than trying to talk through it.
Why do I cry so easily?
Crying easily is partly temperament and partly circumstance. Vingerhoets documented large stable differences between individuals in how readily they cry, and work on sensory processing sensitivity describes a trait, found in a sizable minority of adults, involving stronger reactions to emotional material. The circumstantial causes matter more because they change: short sleep, recovery from illness, alcohol, chronic stress, grief, hormonal shifts, and some medications all lower the threshold. If this is new within the last few months, look at what changed rather than at your character.
How do I stop crying when I am angry?
Frustration tears usually arrive when you feel strongly activated and simultaneously powerless: talked over, accused unfairly, arguing with someone who holds the power. Naming it to yourself in those words helps, because the tears get misread as sadness by everyone in the room, including you. Practically: slow the out-breath, say one short sentence to buy time, and get the conversation paused rather than pushing through. Afterward, write down what the anger was actually about, since frustration tears tend to signal something that has gone unsaid for a while.
Is holding back tears bad for you?
As a short-term move in the wrong setting, no. It is a normal piece of social self-management, and a meeting is a reasonable place to use it. The problem is the long-term version. Routinely suppressing emotion across months is not a comfortable way to live and tends to leak out elsewhere, often as irritability, physical tension, or exhaustion. That is why the second half of this worksheet asks where the tears do get to happen. The aim is choosing the timing, not shutting the feeling down permanently.
Does crying actually make you feel better?
Sometimes, and it depends heavily on context rather than on the crying itself. Bylsma and colleagues' 2008 international study found that people reported feeling better when they had support from others and when the episode was not followed by shame or embarrassment, and worse when it was. So the claim that a good cry always helps is too strong, and so is the opposite claim. Crying with one safe person tends to help. Crying alone at 3am after no sleep, in a situation nothing has resolved, often does not.
When should I be worried about crying a lot?
Pay attention when crying happens most days, arrives with no trigger you can identify, or comes with poor sleep, exhaustion, loss of interest in things you used to care about, or a flat numbness broken by sudden sobbing. That combination points more toward depression or burnout than toward sensitivity, and a better suppression technique is not the right answer to it. Grief is a separate case where crying is the process working rather than a symptom. A self-test can help you organize what to describe to a clinician. If crying has come with thoughts of ending your life, that needs urgent help today rather than a routine appointment: tell someone now.
Is anything I type here saved?
No. Everything stays in your browser on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on our servers, and the PDF is generated locally when you download it. That means the actual meeting, the actual person, and the thing still unsaid can all go on the page. Closing the tab clears it, so download the PDF when you are done, and keep your two moves somewhere you will see them before the next difficult conversation.