No matter what's causing your tears—happiness, sadness, pain—it's inevitable that a good cry will leave you with a runny nose. We've all been in the same sobbing, sniffly place at one time or another. As it turns out, thanks to good ol' biology, there's no way to stop it from happening.

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When you get all snotty during a cry, it's actually because your tears are draining down from your eyes, mixing with snot in your nose, and coming out your nostrils (mind. blown.). "You're not making more mucous, it's just the tears draining and mixing with the mucous [that's already there]," Erich Voigt, M.D., director of the division of general otolaryngology at NYU Langone Medical Center, tells SELF.

"We have baseline tears that flow through the day protecting our eyes," Voigt explains. "There's a constant flow of tears, but it's so subtle that we're not really aware of them," he adds. That’s because, in normal circumstances, tears are produced by glands above the eye, cleaning and lubricating the surface of the eye, then flowing out through our tear ducts, which are located in the inner corners of our upper and lower eyelids. These tears then drain into the nasolacrimal ducts, which run down each side of the nose. In the nose, tears mix with the nasal mucus (aka snot).

When we cry and way more tears than usual are bombarding our eyes, even more fluid travels down through the ducts into the nose and the rest flows straight onto the face (obviously). "So there are tears coming down the face but a lot of them are going down into the nose as well, and that’s when the nose gets stuffy and we do a lot of sniffling," Voigt says. "We sniffle to get the tears out of there, and it pulls them into the throat and we swallow them." Yummy.

If you're wearing eye makeup, it can actually travel into the ducts and stick to the back of your nose. "I’ve had patients come in that have green or blue or black particle matter in their nasal mucous and in fact, it’s coming from their eye makeup," Voigt says. "You can see it in the nose with an endoscope." This can happen from natural baseline tears flushing bits of makeup back over time, or if you're wearing a lot of eye makeup and have a sudden, epic crying episode. "If you have enough, it could block your tear duct, and you’d get chronic tearing," Voigt says. (If you ever notice you tear a lot out of one eye and not the other, it's something you should talk to your eye doc about.) It's typically nothing to worry about, though—most of the particles just get swallowed and your digestive system takes care of cleaning them out. The body can do some pretty cool things.

Photo Credit: Betsie Van der Meer / Getty Images; Social image: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures