Alternative Health Blog

If you hit your finger with a hammer, go ahead and let loose with that string of expletives. it actually will make you feel better, according to a new research study as seen in The Week. "I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear," Richard Stephens, a psychology professor at Keele University in the U.K. tells Scientific American. Stephens became interested in the function of profanity after hearing an earful of it from his wife while she was in labor, and wondered if it served some practical purpose. In one experiment he conducted, participants who were encouraged to curse freely were able to keep their hands in ice-cold water for 40 percent longer than those asked to utter words of the type they'd use to describe a table. Afterward, they also reported feeling less pain than their more polite counterparts. Cursing seems to elevate the heart rate and may, by raising aggression levels, trigger the flight-or-fight response. Previous research shows that this response temporarily mutes the sensation of pain so that we can respond quickly to a threat. The most popular swear words for people in pain, Stephens found, are f---, s---, and the two B words.