Why does your throat close off when you’re upset/crying, making it hard to swallow?
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Swallowing involves closing a muscle in our throats called the glottis, or the gap between two vocal cords. Crying involves opening this muscle. The “lump” in our throats is pretty much caused by the glottis being torn (not literally) between opening and closing. Basically muscle tension. [Source](https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/a-lump-in-your-throat/)
Imagine yourself having a heavy grocery bag around your wrist while simultaneous with the same hand try to put a key into a key hole. Your precision will suffer greatly due to the excess muscle work by lifting the heavy bag.
When people are sad – especially crying heavily, it’s common that people see an general increase in muscle activity which can spread to the pharynx (thorat) and it’s muscles. In short you tense up. Extra muscle tension disrupts the muscle work needed for swallowing normally. Normal swallowing is a highly fine tuned and coordinated muscle work engaging roughly 50 muscles. If there are any disruptions to it, it can affect the persons ability to swallow normally.
Maybe slightly off topic, but humans are known to be the only animals to cry (due to distress/being upset, not as an eye-cleaning process), and so far it’s not understood at all why it is so. As mentioned already, the impediment to the ability to swallowing has more to do with muscle tension/stress and less to do with the crying.
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