live estimate
people crying right now
5,648,105people
0.069% of humanity
modelled estimate · updated every second · nothing here is actually being counted
crying since you opened this page
0
episodes every day
542,218,043
episodes starting every second
6,276
by the numbers
episodes started
6,276
episodes per second
Are you crying right now?
Nobody is counting the world. We can count you, though.
confirmed today0 people
not right now0 people
See what's happening in your country
We only use your location to work out your country. We don't store your address.
by country — right now
| country | local time | awake | people |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 09:18 | 93% | 899,335 |
| India | 06:48 | 25% | 251,602 |
| United States | 20:18 | 85% | 199,731 |
| Indonesia | 08:18 | 85% | 166,968 |
| Mexico | 19:18 | 90% | 81,642 |
| Japan | 10:18 | 96% | 81,422 |
| Philippines | 09:18 | 93% | 74,671 |
| Brazil | 22:18 | 50% | 73,154 |
| Bangladesh | 07:18 | 60% | 72,471 |
| Vietnam | 08:18 | 85% | 59,372 |
How this works (the honest bit).
This rests on a soft figure. Crying is self-reported, and how often people cry varies enormously with age, sex, culture and circumstance - infants cry constantly, and many adults go months without. We assume roughly two episodes a month, lasting about fifteen minutes each, as a broad adult average across the whole world population. That puts a few million people crying at any moment. We are not claiming precision: the shape of the number is the point, which is that it is never nobody. This model counts emotional crying, not the reflex from an onion or a speck of dust. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data, each country's local clock and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.
Does crying actually help?
People report feeling better after crying, and those reports are real. The popular mechanism offered for it holds up much less well.
- The flushes stress hormones claim is oversold. Emotional tears do contain stress-related compounds, and that is often quoted as proof that crying removes them. The quantities are very small next to what the body clears by other routes, so the arithmetic does not support the claim.
- The mood lift is reported, and conditional. Crying is more likely to be followed by feeling better when it is short and happens with social support. Long, solitary crying is more often followed by feeling worse.
- It works on other people. This is the better-evidenced effect. Tears make distress visible and reliably elicit support, which is a real outcome and needs no biochemical explanation.
- Context decides the sign. The same behaviour improves one person's state and worsens another's, depending on who is present. That is not what a simple purge mechanism would predict.
Be careful with the chemistry here. Finding a compound in tears is not evidence that removing it does you good, and the widely repeated version of this claim is stronger than the measurements.
Studies on post-crying mood and on the signalling function of tears. The cortisol-in-tears claim circulates far beyond what the data supports.