Swearing...

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...You hear it all over the place, from kids these days to TV shows. Some people swear more than others, but if you swear like a sailor it may be helping your pain tolerance. An article posted today shared that:

A new study finds that swearing when injured has a measurable effect on pain tolerance. In fact, dropping the F-bomb specifically when in pain increases tolerance by up to 33%.

The study, led by a group of language and psychology experts in the United Kingdom, explored how effective established, new, and invented swear words can be in increasing pain tolerance and pain threshold.

Isn't that some f-ing cool news? However, substitutes for swear words appear not to work as well as the real ones. Perhaps you have already experienced this. The article went on to report:

'From a young age we typically learn to associate them with high-stress situations and that they are forbidden. The study found that these strong sentiments cannot be mimicked by newly created swear words,' says Dr. Stephens. 'Although the words we created, twizpipe or fouch, were shown to be similar to existing swear words in that they were rated as emotion evoking and humorous, they didn’t cut it when it came to pain relief. Repeating the f-word was the best option for increasing tolerance to pain.'

The real swear words were also consistently rated higher in emotional impact than the invented ones, the researchers say.

'The volunteers rated the emotional impact of the f-word as one and a half times more emotional than the new words,' says Dr. Stephens.

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Be well!

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