It’s OK to Cry at Work
Your brain can see every threat to be as dangerous as this grizzly bear staring you down.
Remember that scene in Love Actually where Emma Thompson’s character thinks she’s getting a necklace that she saw her husband buying, but when she opens the gift it’s a Joni Mitchell CD (remember those?), therefore certifying that he bought the necklace for another woman? She excuses herself briefly, listens to some Joni and sheds a few tears very quietly, wipes them away and says “Enough.” Then she takes a deep breath, straightens the bedspread, and walks into the hallway, greets her family with a smile and moves on with the night.
Have you ever had an Emma Thompson moment at work? Slipped quietly into a bathroom or an office or unused conference room with no windows and a door that locks (oddly specific because that’s my preferred place) and cried?
(If you haven’t, I want you to keep reading anyway, because you 100% work with someone, are friends with someone, or have someone in your life who HAS done this. Possibly a lot.)
If you have done this, I want you to tell yourself, right now, that it’s OK. You are not “overly emotional.” You are not wrong. You are not acting in an unprofessional way.
You are a human. And you’re acting like it.
Also? Turns out you’re not necessarily in the driver’s seat - your brain is. I’m going to use highly unscientific terms here (Biology was the only class I got a C in), but here’s the deal, if you didn’t know.
You get into a situation at work where you feel angry, frustrated, betrayed, overwhelmed. It could be that you’re not being listened to, or you have a dust-up with a colleague, or you’ve got some tough stuff going on outside of work.
Your brain says: this is an emergency (especially when you’re feeling something you remember feeling before)! It sends cortisol out which literally SHUTS DOWN your higher brain functions like reason and nuance. You don’t need these things for fighting a bear! You just need to turn and run.
This is when your body is in charge, not you. This is when you’re in that meeting, so frustrated, and you feel those tears coming and your throat closing and you are doing everything you can to tamp it down. Turns out, sometimes you just can’t.
You’re more likely to say something completely out of character for you - snap at someone. You’re more likely to cry those angry tears. Or deeply sad ones. You’re more likely to be defensive and feel an out of body experience that you look back on the next day and feel a lot of shame about - “I can’t believe I cried in front of my boss, he will think I’m so unprofessional.”
Then you blame yourself and feel bad and on and on and on it goes.
The next time this happens, and you feel the fight/flight/freeze/fawn moment coming on, where you’re starting to choke on those tears and worry that they’ll come out…you’re body is about to take over and you’re not going to be able to stop it.
The trick is to know that. And now you know. Next time this happens, notice it in your body. Where are you feeling it? Is it a tightening of your throat? Do you feel sick to your stomach? Do your shoulders tense?
These are your signs that cortisol is on the way.
If you can, take a deep breath. Pause. You don’t have to reply or engage right away. Remind your body that it isn’t being chased by a bear.
You can also politely excuse yourself if you know you’re going to flip into the “chased by a bear” zone.
If neither of these things work? You’re not broken. You’re not overly-emotional. You’re human. Cry it out. Rage it out. Whatever you need to do. But don’t blame yourself and don’t put yourself down.
