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Did you know that swearing can help cope with some types of pain? No joke! There is a line of research that shows that swearing can decrease the amount of pain you perceive, as well as increase your tolerance to pain! To better understand the research, we should first help you understand a relevant difference in pain research.

Acute versus Chronic Pain

Per the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), pain is a physical and emotional experience you have when there is the potential for tissue damage or physical injury. Essentially, every time you believe you have been hurt, you have both a physical and emotional experience. This is not to suggest that pain is not real, as we all know that all pain is real regardless of its cause. There are two types of pain, though, relevant to this article, namely acute and chronic pain.

Acute, or short-term, pain is the pain you immediately feel when you believe you have an injury. For instance, stubbing your toe or hitting your hand with a hammer are two actions that can cause acute pain. If you are like me, you typically let out a yell (or perhaps swear) when something like this occurs, which is part of the emotional aspect of the pain experience. Typically, acute pain reflects physical damage; although this is not always the case as the thermal grill illusion demonstrates.

Another time of pain is chronic pain. Typically, this type of pain has lasted more than three months or past the healing time for an injury. In the case of chronic pain, current theories suggest your brain has been "sensitized" to pain. In other words, your brain either increases a pain signal from the body or actually creates the signal.

The research on swearing to cope with pain does suggest it can be helpful, at least for acute pain. To my knowledge, there is no research on its effect on chronic pain. Like most strategies, the effect is not the same for all people in all instances of pain.

The reason why some people may benefit from swearing to cope with acute pain has to do with what pain is (to learn more, please refer to my prior Pain Psychology 101 blog post regarding why we hurt - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). We have known for almost a century now that the meaning we instill behind our actions influences our experiences and perceptions, including pain experiences.

When someone swears as a means of understanding, processing, and expressing stress, hurt, or suffering, they experience health benefits. In the case of pain, it triggers the areas of your brain associated with the emotional aspect of pain, allowing you to understand better the situation, activate your nervous system's own pain-relief mechanisms, and take action to relieve suffering. Swearing is one way to activate this system to dial down your pain.

When swearing is used habitually as a standard for communicating (e.g., to joke around with friends), the effect it can have on stress, health, and pain is lessened because the expressive and processing nature no longer exists. In other words, swearing ceases to be an instance of emotional expression and processing. It becomes just another form of daily communication (similar to saying your name or the word "the"). It no longer has therapeutic properties.

Well, first off, expressing an emotionally charged word that is not part of your regular vocabulary may help lessen the burden of acute pain. For many people, swear words fit this category; however, I would presume other, more personal words with similar emotional charge might also help (although I don't know of research supporting this presumption). For those of you who habitually use swear words, you may need to find or create another word that expresses frustration, stress, and hurt to yell in order to get the benefits.

So the next time you swear after hitting your thumb with a hammer, you can feel better about letting out a round of profanity.

One notable limitation of this research is that it has only been done in the context of acute pain, not chronic pain. There is, though, a long line of research that suggests other strategies aimed at helping you process and express stress/frustration (e.g., journaling) that can help with both acute and chronic pain, as well as your overall health. Incorporating such tools as swearing and journaling into your coping toolbox can help you better manage your instances of pain.

As always, here are the articles I referenced to make this blog post

-Beecher H. K. (1956). Relationship of significance of wound to pain experienced. Journal of the American Medical Association, 161(17), 1609–1613. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1956.02970170005002 

- Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological science, 8(3), 162-166. 

-Frankl, Viktor E. (Viktor Emil), 1905-1997 author. (1962). Man's search for meaning : an introduction to logotherapy. Boston :Beacon Press, 

- Slavin-Spenny, O. M., Cohen, J. L., Oberleitner, L. M., & Lumley, M. A. (2011). The effects of different methods of emotional disclosure: differentiating post-traumatic growth from stress symptoms. Journal of clinical psychology, 67(10), 993–1007. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20750 

-Stephens, R., Atkins, J., & Kingston, A. (2009). Swearing as a response to pain. Neuroreport, 20(12), 1056–1060. https://doi.org/10.1097/WNR.0b013e32832e64b1 

-Stephens, R., & Umland, C. (2011). Swearing as a response to pain—effect of daily swearing frequency. The Journal of Pain, 12(12), 1274–1281. 

-Stephens, R., & Robertson, O. (2020). Swearing as a response to pain: Assessing hypoalgesic effects of novel “swear” words. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 723. 

-Thorn, B. E. (2004). Cognitive therapy for chronic pain: A step-by-step guide. The Guilford Press.