Why swearing could actually be good for you
If you blurt out some swear words, you could land yourself in hot water at work or be sent away by your family to wash your mouth out with soap.
But according to a new study published in the journal Swearing, swearing may actually have real benefits. American Psychologist.
They found that swearing could be a “calorie-free” way to improve physical performance by helping people overcome their disabilities and push themselves harder when participating in challenging physical activities.
The author of the study is Dr. “In many cases, people consciously or unconsciously restrain themselves from using their full power,” said Richard Stephens. “Swearing is an easy way to help you feel focused, confident, less distracted and to ‘go on’ a little more.”
Previous research by the team suggested that when people swore, they performed better on many physical challenges, including how long they could keep their hands in icy water and how long they could support their body weight during a chair push-up exercise.
But Dr Stephens wanted to understand why people performed better when swearing. He believed that swearing could put people in an uninhibited state of mind, allowing them to push themselves harder.
“We were working with the idea that one of the ways that swearing can have these beneficial effects is that it frees us from our inhibitions in the moment so we don’t hold back and dig deeper into the resources available to us,” he said. Independent.
To test the theory, researchers asked 192 people to repeat either a swear word of their choice or a neutral word every two seconds while pushing a chair. They were then questioned about their mental state during the task.
The researchers found that participants who swore during a chair-push task were able to support their body weight “significantly longer” than those who repeated a neutral word.
They also measured several variables linked to disinhibition and found increases in all of them.
“One was distracting, so we wanted to know how distracting participants found repeating a swear word,” Dr Stephens said. “Swearing with emotional language grabs our attention, so we don’t have enough bandwidth to process the negative thoughts we might have had before. Therefore, we become unblocked.”
The team also developed what is called “psychological flow,” which Dr. It also found an increase in Stephens’ mood, where he was “completely absorbed in a task” and “not thinking about anything else.”
“It’s an enjoyable situation; we feel in control of what we do,” he said. “We think this is because our extroverted mindset is strengthened, stopping thoughts that might otherwise be there, meaning we experience more flow after swearing.”
He also found that people’s self-esteem increased after swearing, allowing them to “forget all the bad things” and do their best.
“These findings help explain why swearing is so common,” Dr Stephens said. “Swearing is literally a calorie-free, drug-free, low-cost tool that is readily available when we need to boost our performance.”
The team now plans to investigate whether this profanity-induced increase works in other contexts, according to study co-author Nicholas Washmuth of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
“Our labs are now examining how profanity affects public speaking and romantic approach behaviors, two situations in which people tend to hesitate or second-guess themselves,” he said.
But Dr Stephens warned that the findings should in no case be used to justify swearing. “Attitudes about swearing are changing, but you have to be careful,” he said.
“Because when blasphemy ceases to be blasphemy, its effects will probably cease. So it’s kind of a balance.”
This comes after a study found that people who swear more are more likely to be honest people. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, Maastricht University, the University of Hong Kong and Stanford studied the Facebook social interactions of 276 people, 73,789 people in a laboratory, and measured the average profanity scores for each US state against the honesty index.
They concluded that “there is a consistent positive relationship between swearing and honesty; swearing is associated with less lying and deception at the individual level and higher honesty at the societal level.”
