--:-- Noelle King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King, standing on business with Maytal Eyal. Maytal is a psychologist and writer. You ended up writing about emotional outbursts online for The Atlantic. How'd you get that assignment?
--:-- Maytal Eyal: I actually was on TikTok doing the strange anthropological research I like to do on TikTok. And I discovered a phenomenon, which I guess we can call it crying TikTok. It is like I have so much pent up emotion inside me that until I let it go, I cannot even think of a solution.
--:-- Noelle King: What is wrong with me? I'm only crying because I'm so fucking angry right now. Because I've never missed a flight in my life. Like, fuck, I'm so mad.
--:-- Maytal Eyal: And I found it to be so fascinating and emblematic of a certain cultural moment we're in. And it was about this concept of what I'm calling vulnerability or artificial process, synthetic vulnerability online.
--:-- Noelle King: You're a therapist. Why did that stand out to you?
--:-- Maytal Eyal: I see people cry a lot. Yes. It's part of the gig. And I think of crying as one of the most vulnerable things you can do. I mean, you take off the mask, you expose yourself, and you show what it's like to be at your rawest.
--:-- Noelle King: But I think crying TikTok is something different. And I think to understand why this phenomenon exists, we have to understand the context we're in right now. I think it's almost become cliche to say we're in a loneliness epidemic. Touch deprivation is a thing that we should be worried about.
--:-- Maytal Eyal: We're in a time period where the average American man for every one hour he spends with a person outside the home, he's spending seven hours watching TV. Wow. So we are starved for connection.
--:-- Noelle King: There was a really interesting study conducted. It was in Australia and it was with Gen Z kids at school and they gave them, I forgot, it was eight or 12 weeks of a something called dialectical behavioral therapy intervention.
--:-- Maytal Eyal: It's like the gold standard in psychology. It was teaching them mindfulness, language about their therapeutic needs. It was teaching them skills to manage anxiety and depression. And by the end of the study, what they found is the mental health of the teens got worse.
--:-- Noelle King: And I think what happens is as people become more and more aware of concepts like trauma and concepts like anxiety and depression, they actually, you know, you think, okay, this is going to be so helpful and allow people to deal with it.
--:-- Maytal Eyal: And sometimes it is helpful, but sometimes what it actually does is it draws more and more attention to what might be wrong. And it actually can sabotage people's mental health. It can cause them to be over-aware and over-conscious that they might not be doing well.
--:-- Noelle King: And so are there better options than therapy for young people?
--:-- Maytal Eyal: So about 70 to 80 percent roughly of the type of therapy people engage in is individual therapy. So it's sitting alone one-on-one with a therapist turning inward on yourself and just excavating excavating excavating who you are what you want what you're afraid of so on and so forth.
--:-- Noelle King: And instead of just sitting one-on-one and turning further and further inward, I think it would be really helpful to sit in a group with other people and turn outward and understand how other people are doing and understand our patterns as we relate to other people.
--:-- Maytal Eyal: I think right now in this like era of loneliness and atomization and everyone is so self-turned, we need to turn back outwards. And I think group therapy would be a really good alternative to individual therapy.
--:-- Noelle King: Kendall Cunningham covers culture for Fox. Coming up next, we're all going to the World's Fair. JK, JK, JK. Okay, we're all going to The Psychologist.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for Today Explained comes from Chime. Nobody likes fees and complicated banking, says Chime. And Chime gets that, says Chime. Chime is a financial technology company that says they understand that every dollar counts.
--:-- Noelle King: Kendall Cunningham: It's a pretty broad term. It basically means to have a meltdown, to reach your limit emotionally. To lose your cool. You can either do it privately or publicly.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: I see us born, dies! You shouldn't have any other choice but to give us a roof over our heads, food for our stomachs, and whatever else we need to survive!
--:-- Noelle King: It could look like crying in your room all day, cursing someone out. I got my period today, so I look in the mirror. Who's that? Who's that big fat, ugly girl? Like, why is my brain... Why? This should not be legal. I cannot remain. who I am in an atmosphere like that.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: And it's so, oh, I'm just so, I want to. You'll often see people talking about crashing out on other people, which can unfortunately mean like physically attacking someone.
--:-- Noelle King: And you're doing all this seemingly without any regard for the consequences of that behavior.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Anyways, in conclusion, tomorrow is not promised. So cuss them out today.
--:-- Noelle King: Yeah, yeah. When was the last time you personally crashed out?
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Oh, God. Honestly, probably my second to last experience at an airport where, as everyone knows, there's a lot of delays happening, just terrible experiences coming and going.
--:-- Noelle King: So I probably had a little crash out in the bathroom. Okay, but you didn't attack anyone. You were just like, let me get in a stall and solve.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: No, it was an internal crash out. Okay, so how did crashing out get on your radar enough for you to write a whole piece about it?
--:-- Noelle King: Well, I've been hearing it for a while now. It's not totally new slang. There have been, like, early uses of it in rap songs and on Black Twitter in, like, the mid-2010s.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: But it became very popular recently amongst Gen Z and even some millennials over the past year.
--:-- Noelle King: Can we normalize crashing out? I really hate for y'all to be having crash out sessions on me and then you turn off your stitches. Girl, turn them back on.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Specifically on TikTok, it's hard to scroll through your For You page, your Explore page without seeing people talking about crashing out.
--:-- Noelle King: And when you start tripping, they'll hold nothing back. Trip all the way.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: And there have been some high profile examples over the past few months. Justin Bieber has been posting a lot of bizarre and very emotionally raw content on social media lately and has been accused of crashing out.
--:-- Noelle King: He also had, like, this viral run-in with the paparazzi where he said... I'm a dad. I'm a husband. You're not getting it. It's not clocking to you. It's not clocking to you that I'm standing on business, is it?
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: And so everyone sort of immediately deemed that as, like, a crash out and sort of, like, found it relatable, weirdly.
--:-- Noelle King: And there's also been this season of Love Island... You are now single and vulnerable. ...where we had a very polarizing contestant named Huda who was having this very sort of unwarranted reaction to being uncoupled from her very short-term boo named Jeremiah on the show.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: He's talking in there. Literally, Nick is trying to convince him to understand that I'm sitting here crying and he's going and having a great day. And now he's thinking about being with Iris. You're a bitch. You're a bitch.
--:-- Noelle King: And she later on went to apologize and admit that she was having a crash out. I'm sorry that I was mean. And, you know, I know I'm not the nicest to you all the time, but I promise I still care.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Did you by any chance see the Hunter Biden video that just came out?
--:-- Noelle King: I did. Yeah, he's been crashing out for a while now, it seems. So I'm not too surprised. But yeah, I would, I think everyone is sort of labeling that a crash out as well.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: It something that as you note in your piece we tend to associate with Gen Z. Why is that?
--:-- Noelle King: I think if you just go on TikTok you see that a lot of the people posting their crash outs are younger people.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: I think we in general just associate a lot of the burgeoning social media trends with that cohort because they are the most online.
--:-- Noelle King: And I think when it comes to crashing out, Gen Z specifically has been more encouraged to go to public platforms to express their emotions.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: A big trend on TikTok before crashing out sort of became a thing was just, you know, going to TikTok to cry and to talk about how bad of a day you had or to talk about a breakup.
--:-- Noelle King: Feeling really defeated by, you know, just day to day stuff makes you feel stupid. I'm trying to go to sleep, but I can't quit crying because I'm thinking, I'm thinking, oh my God, I can't quit crying.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Various sort of private things that Gen Z is very comfortable exposing to a huge audience.
--:-- Noelle King: And a lot of that has to do with like COVID, the fact that, you know, a lot of the communication they're having is on social media.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: And a lot of people may be seeking sort of the immediate validation that you get when something goes viral and you have people sort of immediately sympathizing with you that you may not get in such large numbers in person if you don't have, you know, a community to talk to or friends to talk to.
--:-- Noelle King: So yeah, those are just some of the reasons that it's being associated with Gen Z.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: I guess part of the charm of TikTok is that you're supposed to be a little bit messy, right?
--:-- Noelle King: Yeah, I mean, TikTok is definitely less filtered compared to Instagram and YouTube and even Twitter, which everyone says is like the messiest app, but it's truly TikTok.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: It's a lot of, like, spur-of-the-moment content. You know, people filming themselves right after they've gone to an argument or, like, in the middle of an argument trying to get, like, the Internet's opinion.
--:-- Noelle King: It's a lot of, like, very raw, diaristic content.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Do you think the people who post themselves crashing out online, do you think they have any worries about how this might affect them, I don't know, like, six months from now when everything's fine and you're up for a promotion at work?
--:-- Noelle King: Yeah, it unfortunately doesn't seem like it.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: It's something that I think about all the time. It's so important to realize that like your emotions are most of the time very temporary.
--:-- Noelle King: But I think it sort of speaks to like the desperation of like just wanting connection wanting people to validate your emotions wanting that immediate sort of comfort whether it's from you know a bunch of people that you'll never encounter in real life and don't know you so I think it really just speaks to like this desperate need for wanting to be heard that a lot of people are having right now.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Okay so these kind of trends come and go and yet we all have emotions and we all always will. We will all always have to go to the airport and we will all always have a meltdown there.
--:-- Noelle King: Where do you think crashing out goes from here?
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Hmm. I mean, I think as humans, we love drama and we love mess.
--:-- Noelle King: And it seems like we like observing mess less on like an entertainment level and more amongst just like regular people.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: I feel like the sort of Coldplay incident that happened last week was an example of that. We love just like civilian drama. Either they're having an affair or they're just very shocked.
--:-- Noelle King: I do think that that appetite won't necessarily go away. It may look a little different, but who knows?
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: I mean, generations change. They have different priorities. Maybe we'll see a sort of backlash to this sort of overexposing of our, you know, emotional meltdowns and mental health issues with the next generation.
--:-- Noelle King: But I think that that appetite for mess will still be around.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: I love the idea of the little alphas being like super buttoned up about their feelings. No one knows what that baby is thinking.
--:-- Noelle King: Honestly, I wouldn't blame them.
--:-- Kendall Cunningham: Kendall Cunningham covers culture for Fox.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up next, we're all going to the World's Fair. JK, JK, JK. Okay, we're all going to The Psychologist.
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--:-- Noelle King: Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noelle King: Thank you.
