This article explores why it can be healthy to cry during television shows and movies due to the paradox of tragedy and the duality of emotions.
If you find yourself bawling your eyes out over fictional characters, you are not alone. While some might question if it is healthy to become so attached to fictional characters that their hardships move you to tears, it can be beneficial to confront your fears in a safe environment. Television and film provide the perfect escapist set-up for encountering difficult emotions and experiencing them in a way that is removed from our real lives. Sometimes it is too much to face the difficulties we are going through, but watching a character on-screen experience, overcome, or simply just encounter shared emotions can create a healthy outlet to explore what haunts us. The bonds we form with fictional characters can similarly enhance our real lives.
As viewers, we invest a lot into fictional characters. Our favorite series might contain dozens of hours of content. Watching a show or movie is an escapist outlet. It allows us to exit our current lives and headspace and become absorbed in the lives of someone else. Since we become engrossed in the world-building on-screen and spend a considerable amount of time and emotions invested in what we are watching, it is only natural to feel affected when bad things happen to characters we like. Our favorite characters become almost like friends to us, so we naturally react to what happens to them.
The good news is that it can be beneficial to become so invested in characters we follow on-screen. Time explores that it can actually be healthy to cry over TV shows. The one-directional relationships formed with characters, meaning we explore their lives but they cannot get to know us back, can stimulate our brains as though we are creating real-life relationships. In turn, these attachments can increase self-esteem and feelings of belonging that lessens loneliness. Of course, there can be adverse effects if the emotional connection to a character extends beyond an hour or two. If watching a character suffer leads to prolonged distress and impacted functionality, then it is best to change programs and avoid binge-watching darker subject matter.
Tragic fiction can be enjoyable for audiences due to the paradox of tragedy, as explored by the National Library of Medicine. Tragic art can appeal to audiences for multiple reasons. For one, it acknowledges the sad realities of life in the way that so many forms of social media and status quo expectations fail to do. The paradoxical pleasure we experience from the acknowledgment of sadness can therefore feel good to audiences. This paradox can explain why some people actively pursue negative emotions in art forms even if they seek to avoid the same emotions in real life. Tragic fictional events can provide positive feelings that tragic real-life events cannot. It can feel good to acknowledge sadness in a removed environment where real-world consequences do not apply. In turn, we can derive pleasure from this process.
Fictional tragedy can also provide a safe environment to release negative emotions acquired in our real lives. It can create the ideal outlet for channeling our negative thoughts and feelings and releasing them in a way that will not affect our real-world relationships. Crying, even so frequently as weekly, can be a cathartic process that leaves people often feeling better afterward. Furthermore, meta-emotions can allow us to feel sorrow, but simultaneously feel positive emotions such as gratitude for our empathy. Meta-emotions describe how one feels about feelings. Since both the original emotion and the response to that emotion exist at the same time, one can pull positive feelings from sadness.
Watching television or films and reading literature can improve one’s emotional intelligence by increasing the ability to read other people’s emotions and empathize with their feelings. However, it’s critical to ensure that the same feelings of empathy extend to people in the real world. For example, what happens to real people should be felt more acutely than what happens to fictional people. Therefore, as long as the mourning over fictional characters does not cause long-term distress or mute out sentiments towards real people, crying over television, film, and literature can be a healthy and beneficial outlet for negative emotions.
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