As it turns out, swearing is a powerful pain killer. Fuck pain!
If you stub your toe or break your hand or have your jaw ripped off in a mining accident, your first instinct probably is to let out a string of expletives. And as it turns out, those words that would curl your grandmother’s toes actually do help to get rid of the pain.
In the study, researchers from the UK’s Keele University asked participants for five words they’d likely use after hitting their thumb with a hammer; the first word listed would be their go-to profanity during the experiment. (They were also asked to list five boring words – ones they’d use to describe a table.) Participants were then instructed to submerge their unclenched hand in a container of 41-degree water, and keep it there – while repeatedly cursing – for as long as they could. Before and after plunging their hands into the chilly water, their heart rate was recorded. And after they could no longer stand the cold temperature, they were asked to rate the amount of pain they were in, too.
What’s surprising is that the researchers had thought that swearing would make the cold water feel much colder, lowering the participants’ tolerance for pain and heightening their perception of it. “In fact, the opposite occurred – people withstood a moderately to strongly painful stimulus for significantly longer if they repeated a swear word rather than a nonswear word,” write the team, led by Keele University psychologist Richard Stephens.
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