Letting out a curse word when you get injured may actually help you feel better — at least according to researchers.
U.K. researchers Olly Robertson and Richard Stephens have done several studies over the past few years in order to figure out whether there is a correlation between swearing and pain — and have been successful in linking the two, according to The Washington Post.
In one of their early studies from 2009, they were also able to link swearing with hypoalgesia, which according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is a reduction in pain that occurs during or following exercise.
They also noted that people who used “conventional” swear words after an injury had “a 32% increase in pain threshold and a 33% increase in pain tolerance” compared to those who didn’t. In following studies, they found that conventional swear words had an effect on pain tolerance compared to more “emotional and humorous” words like “fouch” and “twizpipe.”
Stephens noted, per The Washington Post, that this was likely because swearing in pain evoked a bodily response similar to the “fight or flight” stress response in which a person’s heart rate goes up and a surge of adrenaline is released into a person’s muscles to prepare them physically.
Robertson and Stephens also noted that the power of swearing also worked with different languages by comparing English and Japanese speakers — the latter of which doesn’t use swearing as much socially compared to the former, per The Washington Post. They noted that the effect was still the same and swearing in a different language was still linked to pain tolerance no matter the language.
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Samford University professor and physical therapist Nick Washmuth told the outlet that this can be used in real-world practices, for instance, if a person stubs their toe. He suggested people use a swear word that they thought “feels powerful.”
“If no word comes to mind, the f-word is the most commonly self-selected swear word by participants in these studies and is considered one of the most powerful swear words out there,” Samford University professor and physical therapist Nick Washmuth told The Washington Post..
“Swear at a steady pace once a second to once every three seconds, at a normal speech volume,” he further advised.
A 2018 study by Stephens and others found that swearing can go beyond just making you feel better, as it was also linked to “an improvement in strength and power” during an anaerobic power test on a bike. However, as the study noted, it was unclear whether these results are due to an “alteration” of a person’s nervous system or an “unknown mechanism.”
Additional studies on swearing’s effects on the body are being carried out, including one by Washmuth, who wants to understand if the “intensity of the swear word and other variables” could affect pain tolerance and whether a person’s environment, age and how often they swear daily could impact it as well.
“We need to better understand those factors and how they play a role to be able to prescribe swearing in a medical sense, in a clinical sense,” Washmuth told The Washington Post. “Is there an optimal dosage for swearing?”
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