Overflow

The email came in the middle of a workday. I was alone in the living room, away from my work laptop. Pale yellow light lay across the floorboards. I picked up my phone.

The subject line was three plain words. Invitation to Apply.

For eleven years I had entered the lottery to sponsor my parents to Canada. Every year I typed their names into the same small boxes. Every year other families were chosen.

I read the words once. Then I sat down where I was.

The crying came from low in my chest. It was loud in the empty room. My face went hot and red, and my sleeve turned dark against my eyes. The phone dimmed in my hand, then went black. My blurred shape looked back at me from the glass.

I had imagined this moment for over a decade. In every version I was laughing and already dialling my mother. I kept waiting for the laugh. More tears came.

At some point I looked up. The yellow had climbed the wall and gone orange near the ceiling. I did not know how long I had been on the floor.

Something wonderful had happened. I knew that. I cried a little longer.

When has happiness brought you to tears?

Most of us file tears under grief. Yet some of our happiest moments arrive with a wet face. Psychologist Oriana Aragón noticed a strange cousin of this response. Faced with a very cute baby, many of us want to squeeze it or pinch its cheeks.

In a 2015 study, Aragón and her colleagues at Yale showed hundreds of adults photographs of babies. Some faces had been digitally altered to look more infantile, with bigger eyes and rounder cheeks. Others had been made to look less so.

The more infantile babies drew stronger feelings of care. They also drew stronger urges to pinch and squeeze. Some participants said they could eat them up. In one online sample of 679 people, feeling overwhelmed was closely associated with these reactions. The more flooded someone felt with tenderness, the more aggressive their urges became.

Then the researchers checked back five minutes later. People who had expressed more aggression showed a sharper drop in positive feeling. They had come down from the high faster.

The same people turned up across situations. Those most eager to pinch a baby’s cheeks were also more likely to cry at happy moments in films. The team also tested other scenes, including a soldier’s homecoming from war. The pattern seemed to belong to intensity itself. It even ran in reverse. People prone to these expressions also showed them when feelings turned negative, like nervous laughter in a frightening moment.

Aragón called these dimorphous expressions of emotion: one feeling, released through a gesture that usually belongs to its opposite. She suspected each of us has a limit for how much feeling we can hold. Near that limit, the opposite expression may help bring us back down.

The team described this evidence as preliminary. Much of it came from online surveys, where people rated their own urges. The researchers could show the expression and the recovery travelled together. They could not yet show that one caused the other.

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Aragón and Margaret Clark then studied how people respond to tears of joy in someone close. Observers tended to soothe them, gently bringing the feeling down. Smiles of joy drew a different response.

A separate study with John Bargh found the two kinds of happy expression carry different messages. Happiness that looks like anger signals striving toward something still wanted. Happiness that looks like sorrow signals arrival, the pleasure of a goal finally reached.

In 2018, Katherine Stavropoulos and Laura Alba fitted 54 people with electrode caps and showed them images of babies and animals. The urge to squeeze tracked activity in the brain’s reward and emotion systems. Stavropoulos suggested a practical reason. A person too overwhelmed to function could not feed the baby in front of them.

An athlete steps onto the podium and hears her anthem. She has trained for this since she was a child. Her teammates jump and shout. She stands still, and her face crumples.

At a wedding, the groom turns to watch the aisle. Some guests are already clapping. He presses a hand over his mouth.

In a delivery room, a new father is handed his daughter. He expected to laugh. He cannot stop crying long enough to say her name.

We understand the shouting. It looks the way happiness is supposed to look. The tears unsettle us, and we rush in to help.

Shouting and laughter still lean forward. They belong to the part of a moment that wants more, like the next call or the party later. Tears can accompany a different impulse. The thing we reached for is here, and for a moment, the reaching can stop.

Some moments we want to fill. Others we want to stay inside for as long as they will have us. The desire to remain with what is happening can become as powerful as the happiness itself.

So the athlete holds still on the podium. The father keeps his daughter close and says nothing. Neither is in a hurry to get to the next part.

When someone near us cries at good news, we can stop waiting for the laugh. We can let them cry a little longer.

^{This is a space for exploration and reflection, not medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional. This edition contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.}