--- title: The Surprising Health Benefits of Swearing description: Profanity can come with numerous physical, psychological, and social perks. canonical: https://time.com/7272667/swearing-curse-words-health-benefits/ author: Stacey Colino article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-04-01T18:46:55.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:50:06.647Z article:section: Health og:title: The Surprising Health Benefits of Swearing og:description: Profanity can come with numerous physical, psychological, and social perks. og:url: https://time.com/7272667/swearing-curse-words-health-benefits/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta1d6a4743033c9ee/6998c55c93610c6bb8c2f7f3/benefits-of-swearing.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: benefits-of-swearing og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Surprising Health Benefits of Swearing twitter:description: Profanity can come with numerous physical, psychological, and social perks. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta1d6a4743033c9ee/6998c55c93610c6bb8c2f7f3/benefits-of-swearing.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Surprising Health Benefits of Swearing > Sponsored content. 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A modern-day remix might look like this: a person still on a couch, but at home, scrolling through a constantly refreshing selection of mental-health content on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram._ by [Stacey Colino](https://time.com/author/stacey-colino/) ## Stacey Colino Colino is a contributor for TIME. Apr 1, 2025 6:46 PM UTC  Photo-Illustration by Chloe Dowling for TIME (Texture: Golfloi17/Getty Images) by [Stacey Colino](https://time.com/author/stacey-colino/) ## Stacey Colino Colino is a contributor for TIME. Apr 1, 2025 6:46 PM UTC Many of us try to suppress the urge to blurt out an expletive when something goes wrong. But the instinct may actually be useful: Research has found that using profanity can have beneficial effects on people’s stress, anxiety, and depression. In fact, there are numerous potential physical, psychological, and social perks related to the power of a well-timed F-bomb. Here are the hidden health perks of swearing that science has uncovered. ## It can help you tolerate pain Cursing induces what’s called hypoalgesia, or decreased sensitivity to pain. [Researchers](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19590391/) have shown that after uttering a curse word, people can keep their hands submerged in ice water for longer than if they say a more neutral word. “Swearing is a readily accessible, low-cost means of self-help,” says Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University in the U.K. and author of the book _Black Sheep: The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad_. But here’s an interesting twist: “People who swear less often get more benefit from swearing when they need it,” he says. In other words, cursing all the time zaps the words of their potency. ## You’ll work out harder Swearing aloud is associated with improvements in exercise performance, including cycling power and hand-grip strength. A [study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218221082657) in a 2022 issue of the _Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology_ even found that when people repeated a swear word while doing [chair push-ups](https://www.nyp.org/healthlibrary/multimedia/how-to-do-chair-push-ups), they reported feeling more self-confidence. **Read More**: [_8 Things to Say During a Fight With Your Partner_](https://time.com/7268358/what-to-say-during-fight-with-partner/) Swearing seems to help people shed their social inhibitions, according to Stephens, one of the study’s authors. “When we’re disinhibited, we’re no longer as worried about negative social evaluation,” which in turn leads to greater confidence, he explains. ## It can help you regulate emotions A [study](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218221082657) in the _European Journal of Social Psychology_ found that when people wrote about a time they felt socially excluded, then repeated a swear word for two minutes, their hurt feelings and social distress were significantly lower than for people who used a neutral word. In another [study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1369847818301918), researchers found that when drivers cursed after being refused the right of way by another driver, or when they encountered a traffic jam caused by cars that were stopped illegally, cursing helped them tamp down their anger and return to a more balanced emotional state. “Swearing allows us to vent and cope with emotions such as anger and frustration,” says Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and author of the books _Why We Curse_ and _Cursing in America_. ## It can make people feel closer “I think of swear words as being like a box of tools,” Jay says. ”We can use them in different ways in different situations for personal or social gain.” There appear to be surprising social benefits associated with the well-timed use of profanity. “Some people believe that profanity can break social taboos in a generally non-harmful way, \[which\] can create an informal environment in which people feel like insiders together,” says Ben Bergen, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the book _What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves_. “Similarly, swearing can lead others to believe that the person speaking is honest because they’re saying what they really believe.” As evidence, consider this: A series of [studies](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550616681055) published in the journal _Social Psychological and_ _Personality Science_ found a positive relationship between the use of profanity and honesty, based on how and when people cursed in their everyday lives; the researchers concluded that “profanity was associated with less lying and deception” and a greater sense of integrity. In another series of [studies](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/106831605160512331329952) in the journal _Psychology, Crime & Law_, researchers found that the use of swear words in (fictitious) legal testimony made the testimony seem more credible to participants than when the same testimony was free of profanity. **Read More**: [_Are You a Hostile Punctuator???_](https://time.com/7272258/hostile-punctuation-texting-email-exclamation-question-marks/) In the right context, swearing has been found to bolster social connections. In a [study](https://seth-smith.org.uk/images/laughter/expletives.pdf) involving workers in a soap factory in New Zealand, researchers recorded their daily interactions and concluded that when the F-word was used on the factory floor to express a complaint or objection, it seemed to engender more communal feelings among workers. Of course, it is possible to overdo it. People who swear frequently are sometimes perceived as angry, hostile, or aggressive, so there’s a potential tipping point to using profanity. It’s also important to know your audience. “Observing how others use language is usually a good first step in a new environment,” Bergen says. “It’s not just whether people are using profanity or not—it’s how they’re using it and what specific words or kinds of words they’re using. Is this the kind of situation where mild swears seem generally used? Do people seem to react positively to people using language that way? Is everyone using profanity or just particular people?” Swearing etiquette may depend on the social hierarchy and power dynamics in certain situations, such as the workplace, says Jay. Just because the boss uses curse words doesn’t necessarily mean you can get away with it. (You’ll also want to modify your language around young children.) Being attentive to nuances in how curse words are used in different settings can guide you toward a more productive relationship with profanity. ## Transcript For mental health issues you might be avoiding right now. One, you don't have the life you had before the pandemic. You never will again. When the pandemic was happening and everyone was experiencing lots of like mental health issues, it put a spotlight on mental health creators that were posting online. You can't love someone else until you love yourself as bullsht. Because one end implies that people with low self-esteem or mental health issues are incapable of loving others. Just so. With that, I have a disclaimer on my, you know, TikTok and Instagram that this is not therapy or my mental health pics are not specifically tailored to you. Sure, I'm a licensed therapist, but I'm not your lessons therapist. All the online spaces where I share content. Yes. Even those livestreams where you shoot me questions are not therapy sessions, so I want somebody to like taking my content and then think about it and analyze it. Therapy speak is a new way of saying psychobabble. They're usually more like vulnerable words that talk about like the primary emotions that you're experiencing. But there's other ways that people are using that language, hurt people or manipulate people or control people or sort of like shut down conversations. There's a difference between selfishness and grandiosity and narcissism. It's very rare that you would be diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder. They tend to believe everything is everyone else's fault, and it comes out of early childhood. There is a stage of development where your ego is separate from other people's ego, and you're able to see that both of those are important. Something is wrong and that development and it leads someone having a really hard time seeing other people's needs as important as their own. Gaslighting is a pretty popular term these days, and what it means is somebody is trying to manipulate you into believing in a reality that's not true. But sometimes people are like, What? You're disagreeing with me. You're not validating my experience, you're gaslighting me, which is not actually what they're doing. So if you say that somebody is a gaslighter, that can be like a pretty incendiary accusation. You and I think that everybody should clearly express what their boundaries are in relationships. It's sort of like a blueprint that you'll offer somebody. So a healthy boundary that somebody might create is I'm not going to continue talking to you if you start to yell at me a different way to use boundaries. That's not exactly correct is to try to control somebody's behavior and manipulate somebody's behavior. You're allowed to say, I don't want to go to dinner, right? That's a boundary. But to be like, you know, well, I'll go if you go to this kind of place, but I'm not going to go if you go to this kind of place and you can't tell me, I can't because I'm allowed to set boundaries. Right. You're now like over stating it. Five small but very brave green flags in a relationship. One you sense their connection with you throughout the day. We keep talking for decades and decades and decades in the field of how we can improve mental health. And the reality is, is that the way you improve anything is with education. Therapists and Instagram and YouTube could do a better job at verifying their licenses and degrees and trainings that therapists have. And if therapists and mental health professionals didn't have to talk about things in coded ways like eating disorders or social justice or anxiety or depression or suicidality, then I think that there could be like some really good education happening online. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/7272667/swearing-curse-words-health-benefits/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/7272667/swearing-curse-words-health-benefits/"},"headline":"The Surprising Health Benefits of Swearing","datePublished":"2025-04-01T18:46:55.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:50:06.647Z","description":"Profanity can come with numerous physical, psychological, and social perks.","url":"https://time.com/7272667/swearing-curse-words-health-benefits/","keywords":["Wellness","freelance","Evergreen","healthscienceclimate"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta1d6a4743033c9ee/6998c55c93610c6bb8c2f7f3/benefits-of-swearing.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Stacey Colino","jobTitle":"Colino is a contributor for TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/stacey-colino/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta1d6a4743033c9ee/6998c55c93610c6bb8c2f7f3/benefits-of-swearing.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"benefits-of-swearing","caption":"","creditText":"Photo-Illustration by Chloe Dowling for TIME (Texture: Golfloi17/Getty Images)","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/wellness/","name":"Wellness"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/7272667/swearing-curse-words-health-benefits/","name":"The Surprising Health Benefits of Swearing"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online","description":"The classic vision of therapy revolved around a person on a couch, supine, tapping into their deepest and darkest hopes and fears. 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