The Tears That Come Without a Story

What the Research Actually Shows

Begin with the phrase itself, because it is doing quiet damage: crying for no reason. It sounds like a fault — tears with no cause, a system misfiring. What the research suggests is almost the opposite. The reason is usually there; what has changed is how easily it reaches you. In the years around menopause the threshold for tears drops, so the same tender or tired or overwhelmed feeling that once stayed below the surface now spills over at an advert, a kind word, a song in the car. You are not crying without cause. You are crying with a lower wall in front of the cause.

The engine of that lowered wall is hormonal, but not in the crude way it gets talked about. It is not simply that estrogen is “low.” It is that estradiol becomes variable — rising and falling unpredictably — and that this swing, when it meets ordinary life stress, is what destabilises mood. In one carefully tracked study, researchers took repeated hormone measurements across fourteen months and found that it was the standard deviation of a woman’s estradiol — how much it jumped around, not how high or low it sat — that predicted depressive and tearful symptoms, and it did so most in women who had recently been through a stressful life event (Gordon et al., 2016). The takeaway is oddly reassuring: the weepiness is not proof that something is permanently wrong. It is a nervous system riding an unstable hormonal signal through a demanding stretch of life.

The second thing worth knowing is that the transition itself can lift the baseline of low, tearful mood — even in women with no history of it. In a prospective study that followed women for eight years from a premenopausal start, all of them free of depression at the outset, the odds of developing depressed mood rose as they moved into the menopausal transition and their hormones began to fluctuate (Freeman et al., 2006). Read that carefully, because it matters: women who had never been “the crying type,” who had no prior depression to blame, still found mood and tears shifting as they entered this passage. That is not a personality collapsing. That is a body moving through a documented transition.

So if the tears are not a fault, what are they? Here the science says something most of us were never told. Emotional crying is not the breakdown of self-regulation — it is a form of it. Reviewing the evidence, researchers describe crying as a self-soothing behaviour: tears tend to follow a spike of distress and then help bring the body back down, calming arousal and, when others are near, signalling for the comfort and connection that settle us further (Gračanin et al., 2014). In other words, the thing you are trying to stop is part of how the system rights itself. The crying is not the problem the tears are trying to solve. The crying is the solving.

What Perukua Says About the Tears

Perukua — the Australian vocalist and women’s facilitator whose sound work has reached women in more than 63 countries — would put it more plainly still: the tears were always going to come, because they were always in there. Her whole understanding of women’s emotional life begins from a single conviction, and she states it flatly. “The body and the emotions are always sincere,” she says. “They never lie” (interview, Everything Is Within You). If that is true, then a wave of tears is not noise to be silenced. It is a message that has finally gotten loud enough to be heard.

She is equally clear about why, for so many women, the message had to wait until midlife to break through. “We were taught to be good, sweet, quiet girls,” she says. “We systematically — in the structure of society and of the family — learned to suppress our emotions” (interview, Everything Is Within You). A lifetime of that leaves a reservoir. And she is unsparing about what the holding costs: “if we suppress and subdue it,” she warns, “everything becomes rigid, unmanageable, begins to wither, loses its life force.” The weepiness of the late forties, in her reading, is often that reservoir meeting a moment when the body can no longer keep the lid on — and, mercifully, stops trying.

She knows the release from the inside. She describes her very first singing lesson, in her early twenties, when something long shut began to open: “After my first vocal lesson I cried without stopping,” she recalls. “My soul was pouring out, rejoicing that I had finally heard it” (interview, Everything Is Within You). Notice she does not describe the crying as a low point but as a homecoming — the sound of something true getting through at last. And she insists this range is not instability but wholeness. “One moment you can be a very strong, direct, businesslike woman,” she says, “and the next you are almost in tears, soft, tender — we women have so many shades inside us, and all of them want to be expressed.” The woman who cries at 48 has not lost her competence. She has simply stopped amputating the rest of herself to keep it.

What Perukua adds to the research, then, is not a contradiction of it but a completion. The science explains why the threshold dropped; she explains what is waiting behind it. Her work with women is built around giving that held feeling a way to move — through the body and the voice — rather than driving it back down. It is the same logic she brings to the whole hormonal passage in her course, Woman’s Guide to Wholesome Period: not fighting the tide of the transition, but learning to move with it.

Why the Tears Come — and How to Tell Them From Depression

Put the two accounts together and the mechanism is simple to picture. Imagine a reservoir and a wall. The reservoir is everything you have felt and not fully expressed — the griefs swallowed to stay strong, the angers made polite, the tenderness there was never time for. For years the wall held: you were busy, you were needed, the hormones that partly buffered your mood were steady. Then, in the late forties, two things happen at once. The reservoir is fuller than it has ever been. And the wall — held up in part by stable estrogen — starts to thin and shift as the hormone swings (Gordon et al., 2016). The tears that “come from nowhere” are simply the overflow finding the lowest point in a wall that used to be higher.

This is why the crying so often feels mismatched to its trigger — why a coffee advert can undo you while a genuine crisis leaves you dry-eyed. The trigger is not the cause; it is the crack. Any small thing that gets past the lowered wall lets some of the reservoir out. And because the reservoir is old, the tears can carry feeling that has nothing to do with the advert at all. That is not confusion. That is a backlog, draining.

One honest distinction has to sit here, because not everything that looks like tearfulness is the ordinary overflow of the transition. Perimenopausal weepiness tends to come in waves: it rises, it passes, and between the waves you can still be reached — a friend, a walk, a good hour still lands. Depression is flatter and more total. It drains colour from things unrelated to any single loss, sits for weeks rather than moving through, turns the inner voice harsh, and does not lift when something good happens; sometimes it takes tears away entirely and leaves only numbness. Perukua is an artist and a facilitator, not a doctor, and an article is not a diagnosis. If low or flat mood has lasted more than two weeks, if you have lost interest in almost everything, or if you have any thought that life is not worth living, that is the point to bring it to a doctor — and any question of HRT or antidepressants belongs with your physician too. Telling ordinary tears apart from depression is not weakness. It is the most useful thing you can do for yourself in this passage.

A Practice for Tears That Ambush You

The instinct when tears keep ambushing you is to clamp down harder — to apologise, to swallow, to get a grip. If the research is right, that is the move that keeps the reservoir full and the pressure high. This practice does the opposite. It gives the feeling a small, contained, daily way out, so it stops having to force its way out at the checkout.

Once a day, in a private few minutes, let it move on purpose. Sit, put one hand on your chest and one low on your belly, and breathe down into the belly until you feel it rise under your hand. Then let a feeling be there without arguing with it, and — this is the part we skip — give it a sound. A long, low hum on the out-breath, four or five times, until you feel it in your throat and chest. If the hum wants to become a sigh, or the sigh wants to become tears, let it. You are not breaking down; you are draining the reservoir a cupful at a time, in a place of your choosing. This is the piece Perukua teaches throughout her course Woman’s Guide to Wholesome Period — using the breath and the voice to let held feeling pass through the body instead of lodging in it.

Then, so “no reason” stops being a mystery, keep a two-line log. Each time the tears come, note in a few words what happened just before — a phone call, a smell, tiredness, a certain hour, where you were in your cycle if you are still cycling. You are not analysing; you are collecting. Within a couple of weeks the “random” tears usually turn out to have quiet patterns — they cluster around exhaustion, or a particular week, or a particular subject you have been avoiding. Naming the pattern does two things: it gives you back a sense of cause, and it often points, gently, at the exact thing in the reservoir that most wants attention.

In Closing

We tell women to pull themselves together, and then wonder why the tears keep breaking through. The research quietly reframes the whole thing: the crying at 48 is not a system failing but a threshold lowering — a wall thinned by shifting hormones, letting through feeling that was always there — and the tears themselves are one of the body’s oldest ways of setting itself right. Perukua would only add that what is coming up was never random and was never shameful. It is you, more of you, finally reaching the surface. The task is not to stop the tears. It is to let them move, give them a voice, and listen to what they were carrying all this time.

This piece touches on low mood and depression. If you are struggling badly, please reach out to a doctor — and if you ever have thoughts that life is not worth living, contact a local crisis line or emergency services. Support helps, and you do not have to carry this alone.

References & Quote Sources

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