Marianne Ayala/Insider Gen Zers are posting TikTok videos of themselves crying over breakups. The vulnerable videos, where people sob in bed or on the floor, have gotten millions of views. Creators say that they don’t regret the posts and that strangers’ support has helped them grieve.
After 5 1/2 years, one apartment, and one jointly owned dog, Ashley Singh, 23, was experiencing her first devastating heartbreak. In May, five months after splitting from her boyfriend, Singh was suffering through her worst day of grieving yet, sobbing on the floor of her Seattle apartment. She pulled her phone out and hit record.
“For some reason, I decided to document myself — and the feelings at that moment,” Singh told Insider. She added that since she “knew that a lot of other people could relate,” she uploaded the unedited footage on TikTok. To Singh’s great surprise, the video went viral.
It’s been viewed 13. 3 million times. Crying over a broken heart, like any expression of emotion, isn’t new to self-documentation online.
It’s a slippery phenomenon to quantify — videos tagged with #crying amount to 11. 4 billion views on TikTok, while videos tagged #breakup have 24. 7 billion views — but casual observers might have noticed an uptick in post-breakup selfie-mode sobbing on the app of late.
And even though not much happens in them — the camera rolls, the person cries — quite a few have gone viral. “Some people said ‘You shouldn’t really post stuff like that on TikTok’ and ‘You should take it down,'” Singh said. “But at that point I thought: I know this video has reached so many other people going through the same thing, and I think this is helping people.
I’d rather not take it down. “Gen Z loves TikTok’s authenticity and is unafraid of using it to discuss mental healthHeavily populated by Gen Zers, TikTok has become emblematic of the generation’s preference for authenticity over artifice and aspiration. On the For You page, videos trained on weeping, heartbroken young adults play on an endless loop for millions of people to see.
In one video with 2. 6 million views, a woman sheds tears in bed. In another with 10.
9 million views, a woman shows a photo of her ex, followed by a shot of herself weeping on the floor. Why does Gen Z feel so comfortable sharing its lowest moments? Emma Adam, an applied developmental psychobiologist, says it’s likely a combination of generational factors, such as high rates of anxiety and depression as well as high levels of empathy. Compared with other generations, Gen Z has exceptionally high levels of anxiety and depression.
The CDC found that suicide rates for people ages 10 to 24, after a period of stability from 2000 to 2007, had risen nearly 60 percent by 2018. Adam, who’s also a fellow at Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research, administered a questionnaire to 18- to 29-year-olds from March 2020 to August 2022. She and her colleagues found that 40% demonstrated clinically significant anxiety and 35% showed signs of clinically significant depression.
The youngest members of the group reported the highest levels of mental illness. At the same time, the pandemic made Gen Zers demonstrably more empathetic. Adam and her colleagues found that compared to pre-pandemic surveys, low- and middle-income Gen Zers showed an increase in how “caring” they described themselves as being.
(Why not the wealthy? Adam isn’t sure, but it may have to do with inequality, as wealthy Gen Zers may have been more insulated from the pandemic’s economic effects and seen less illness. )The result, Adam said, is Gen Zers feeling depression and anxiety intensely, as well as feeling more empathy for others in the same boat. Throw in the ubiquity of smartphones and social media, and “that creates an environment where you’re more likely to share,” she said.
“There’s a lot more expression of emotion and a lot more acceptance of the expression of emotion than there used to be,” Adam said, “because everybody recognizes how difficult things have been. “TikTok can help Gen Zers escape the loneliness of heartbreakLori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist who wrote the New York Times bestseller “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,” said that while she hadn’t seen anything like them before, TikToks of people crying over breakups didn’t necessarily come as a surprise. In heartbreak, our isolation is particularly intense: We lose the person we’d normally turn to in times of emotional pain.
For those experiencing it for the first time, a breakup can be crushing, and after a while the people in their lives may grow impatient. “They say things like, ‘Shouldn’t you be over that by now? Why are you taking it so hard?'” Gottlieb said. “They minimize it.
“But the details of their heartbreak can seem ever new — and the possibility of support never-ending — online. Gottlieb noted that in their videos, the TikTokers outlined their loss in text: the years they were together, the rejection they felt, “everything they’ve lost. “Some post their tears to seek communion with others — but it may not be the healthiest grieving ritualIn January, Kyleigh Hensler, a 24-year-old living in Wisconsin, was dealing with a breakup that she said made her feel like “the complete opposite” of who she was.
Like Singh, she spontaneously uploaded her own crying video on TikTok; it got 5. 4 million views. Hensler told Insider via Instagram direct message that she made the video in order to make her own feelings of despair tangible and visible.
She also hoped for communion with others. “I didn’t post it for it to go viral,” Hensler said. “I posted it because I wanted to document how I was feeling, so I didn’t feel so alone.
“As the philosophical puzzle goes, if a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a person cries in anguish alone, does their pain really exist? When others aren’t around, we might seek out a mirror. Or we might turn on the front-facing camera and hit record. Grieving rituals — funerals, Irish wakes, sitting shiva, even mass displays for public figures like the Queen — help mourners feel that they aren’t alone in their sadness, Pauline Boss, a therapist and author who specializes in the study of grief, told Insider.
But Boss added that for rituals to be meaningful, we need to do them with at least one other person. “You need a witness,” Boss said. Can millions of strangers be our witnesses? Boss isn’t sold.
“Rituals assume you’re doing them with some other human beings by your side. I think online, you think they’re by your side, but they’re not — you are alone,” she said. “There’s no touching, there’s no reading of facial features or hearing of voice intonations.
“Crying videos helped TikTokers reconnect with IRL friends and familyHensler and Singh said the sheer volume of support they received from strangers online did help them cope. People suffering similar heartbreak reached out to them for advice, while those who’d recovered left words of encouragement about the future. Both estimated that less than 5% of the comments they received were negative.
Gottlieb said she wasn’t surprised that most of the comments were kind. By opening up to so many people, posters are more likely to connect with people who can relate. “There’s a shared humanity that feels comforting,” she said, even if it falls short of the true vulnerability of “taking off the mask, in person, face-to-face with somebody that matters to you.
“For Singh, making the video allowed her to find that in-person vulnerability: Friends who’d lost touch reached out to offer encouragement, and she made IRL friends with some fellow Washingtonians who responded to her TikTok. It also sparked a deeper conversation with her mother, who doesn’t use TikTok but was shown the video by somebody else. “She didn’t know how depressed I was at the time,” Singh said.
“It kind of forced me to open up emotionally to my family. “Hensler said that grief is nuanced, and that online and in-person support don’t need to be either-or. “When someone’s going through something as awful as heartbreak, everyone copes differently,” Hensler said.
“Some people may use social media as a branch of coping and asking to be understood. “Email tips on all things internet to mleighton@insider. com.
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URL: https://www.insider.com/gen-z-tiktok-crying-breakup-videos-why-therapists-support-2022-11