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How swearing helps relieve pain

"What you're seeing here is, we've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient. This may shock you, but we're literally reading this person's brain in real time. They're watching their own brain activation, and they're controlling the pathway that produces their pain."

Richard Stephens and his colleagues from Keele University found that swearing makes people more able to tolerate pain. His study involved participants sticking their hands in ice cold water and seeing how long they could hold their hand inside. They found the participants who swore, could hold their hands in twice as long than the ones who said neutral words.

Swearing increases pain tolerance. Perhaps swearing isn't so bad?

SWEARING occurs in most cultures - people swear to let off steam, or to shock or insult others. It is also a common response to a painful experience. We've all done it: after stubbing our toe, or hitting our thumb with a hammer, we draw a sharp breath and mutter a swear word.

I think that many of us have heard that swearing can help to improve pain tolerance, but this study shows that only using "real" swear words help. This makes me wonder what makes swear words so bad, and why it is so taboo to say them. I don't think it has very much to do with how rude the meaning of the word is. For example, I can say something like "explosive diarrhea" in class, but I can't say "sh*t". Also, why does text censoring make it better? We all know what the word says.

This article has a video of an experiment that the Mythbusters conducted. Their test subject submerged her arm into ice water, the first time around she could not swear, and the second time around, she could swear. They tested how long she could keep her arm in each time.

Swearing like a sailor helps to lessen pain. Study shows that swearing and the effect of the brain helps to lessen pain. This is a book so you might have to download a PDF.

This article explains how some words can bring back painful memories for some people.

Dropping the F-bomb or other expletives may not only be an expression of agony, but also a means to alleviate it Bad language could be good for you, a new study shows. For the first time, psychologists have found that swearing may serve an important function in relieving pain.

Swearing has become a normal part of society's universal conversation. Whether you're in the nosebleeds cheering on your favorite team and a hearty "f--- yeah!" helps to get the crowd rallying together, or you're running to answer the phone and stub your toe along the way, something about yelling "damnit!"

The Latin word anathema has evolved over time. Today, it means "a strongly disliked person or thing," e.g. "bullying is anathema to me." In medieval times, however, "anathema" means "an excommunicated person, also the curse of excommunication." In medieval, pre-printing press times, books were highly valued and rare, as they were laboriously handwritten by monks, and sometimes took years to produce. Given the extreme effort that went into creating books, scribes and book owners had a real incentive to protect their work. They used the only power they had: words. At the beginning or the end of books, scribes and book owners would write dramatic curses threatening thieves with pain and suffering if they were to steal or damage these treasures. They did not hesitate to use the worst punishments they knew-excommunication from the church and horrible, painful death. Steal a book, and you might be cleft by a demon sword, forced to sacrifice your hands, have your eyes gouged out, or end in the "fires of hell and brimstone." "These curses were the only things that protected the books," says Marc Drogin, author of Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. "Luckily, it was in a time where people believed in them. If you ripped out a page, you were going to die in agony. You didn't want to take the chance."

Swearing, the critics say, may make us appear ill-educated, rude and untrustworthy, as our mothers might have tried to drill into us. But it could have some surprising benefits, from making us more persuasive to helping relieve pain.

We each absorb select scenes in our environment through which we interpret a situation, creating our own reality by that to which we give attention. Our brain naturally tries to process what could otherwise be overwhelming amounts of information, by reducing it to a simplified story. However, because that story is based on a small sliver of reality, our perception may be incorrect. Thought holes, or cognitive distortions, are skewed perceptions of reality. They are negative interpretations of a situation based on poor assumptions. Studies show self-defeating thoughts (i.e., "I'm a loser") can trigger self-defeating emotions (i.e., pain, anxiety, malaise) that, in turn, cause self-defeating actions (i.e., acting out, skipping school). Left unchecked, this tendency can also lead to more severe conditions, such as depression and anxiety. Accurate thinking--identifying and recognizing one's false assumptions--can help reduce negative thinking. Here are 8 common thought holes: 1. Jumping to conclusions: judging a situation based on assumptions as opposed to definitive facts 2. Mental filtering: paying attention to the negative details in a situation while ignoring the positive 3. Magnifying: magnifying negative aspects in a situation 4. Minimizing: minimizing positive aspects in a situation 5. Personalizing: assuming the blame for problems even when you are not primarily responsible 6. Externalizing: pushing the blame for problems onto others even when you are primarily responsible 7. Overgeneralizing: concluding that one bad incident will lead to a repeated pattern of defeat 8. Emotional reasoning: assuming your negative emotions translate into reality, or confusing feelings with facts

Lin, of National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan and Peper, of San Francisco State University, examined the psychophysiological effects of texting. Results indicated that all subjects showed significant increases in respiration rate, heart rate, SC, and shoulder and thumb SEMG as compared to baseline measures. Eighty-three percent of the participants reported hand and neck pain during texting, held their breath, and experienced arousal when receiving text messages. Subjectively, most subjects were unaware of their physiological changes. The study suggests that frequent triggering of these physiological patterns (freezing for stability and shallow breathing) may increase muscle discomfort symptoms. Thus, participants should be trained to inhibit these responses to prevent illness and discomfort.

This article examines Nadine Gaab's 2014 study which established a connection - in both children and adults - between learning to play an instrument and improved executive functioning, like problem-solving, switching between tasks and focus. The article also cites the research of neuropsychologist Ani Patel, who advances the OPERA theory of music's benefits for learning. Patel notes "music is not an island in the brain cut off from other things, that there's overlap, that's the 'O' of OPERA, between the networks that process music and the networks that are involved in other day-to-day cognitive functions such as language, memory, attention and so forth," he says. "The 'P' in OPERA is precision. Think about how sensitive we are to the tuning of an instrument, whether the pitch is in key or not, and it can be painful if it's just slightly out of tune." That level of precision in processing music, Patel says, is much higher than the level of precision used in processing speech. This means, he says, that developing our brains' musical networks may very well enhance our ability to process speech. "And the last three components of OPERA, the 'E-R-A,' are emotion, repetition and attention," he says. "These are factors that are known to promote what's called brain plasticity, the changing of the brain's structure as a function of experience."

This article helps to explain a couple of reasons why people may swear. It says one of the main uses for a swear word is to offend someone. But, along with a degree of offense, swear words are used to vent some emotion or provide an emotional release. This article also shares how swearing can be a form of bonding between individuals, and that those that swear are perceived as more trustworthy than their non-swearing counterparts. It also states that there is paradoxical component to swearing. Along being taboo-breaking they are taboo-breaking for the sake of being taboo-breaking, and they exist just so that the rules can be broken.

This article explores the ideas behind why people swear. It found that most people swear to express their emotions. The article also found that swearing can provide a sort of cathartic experience when feeling things like pain, anger, etc.

Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of "catching" other people's emotions and moods. According to Elaine Hatfield, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii, humans are hard-wired "to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally." Primitive emotional contagion is a basic building block of human interaction. It helps us coordinate and synchronize with others, empathize with them, and read their minds-all critical survival skills. When we mimic, the body gets feedback about the expressions we've taken on; we then feel what the other person is feeling. Gary Slutkin, a physician, epidemiologist, and founder and CEO of the nonprofit Cure Violence, says that emotional contagion, specifically anger and violence, springs from four mechanisms involving the brain: 1. Engagement of the cortical pathways for copying, a behavior related to mimicry. The most contagious behaviors are the most emotionally engaging, as well as the ones carried out by the people who are most relevant to you. 2. Activation of the brain's dopamine system, which works in anticipation of a reward. "Activation of that system puts you down a pathway toward what is important socially and for survival," he says. If you anticipate being rewarded for responding to someone with anger or violence, you are more likely to get on that behavioral track. 3. The brain's pain centers activate from veering off or being shut out from getting a reward. "A sense of I can't stand it lights up in the context of disapproval." 4. Serious injuries or abuse cause the limbic system and amygdala in the lower brain to become hyperreactive. "This causes you to be less in control, which accelerates violent behavior," Slutkin says. It also makes you more likely to get angry and be quick to react. "Then there's hostile attribution, another part of what happens with the limbic sy