Have you ever accidentally bumped your toe against the corner of a table? If you answered yes (and I imagine most of you have) then the next few words that came out of your mouth probably went something like this, “F#@%, you m#@$%&+;&*@ table. How in the f#@$ can you cause so much pain? Oh f#@$,” don’t try to deny it, that almost exactly what happened.
Everyone swears (or at least wants to swear) when they get physically hurt, it’s almost like a reflex. There are some people who say swearing helps them deal with the pain better; the Mythbusters even did a little stint on it.
http://www.discovery.com/embed?page=79983
Also, I remember this scene I saw in this movie called ‘The King’s speech.’ In the scene, the king (he wasn’t the king at the time) is working on treating his stutter, and his therapist tells him to start swearing! What follows is a minute of the Duke of Wales shouting out various profanities at the top of his lungs. Why is he doing this? His therapist tells him to do it in an effort to help him relax and loosen up a bit.
When I thought of this scene I started to wonder, can swearing help reduce stress and anxiety? Well I looked it up and apparently it does. That’s right, swearing can actually help relieve tension and stress. One article from spcr.org by Take Two, states that swearing is a safe way for us to vent our emotions. In personal.psu.edu, a blog post written by Kevin J. Kim he says that swearing is a lot better way to vent than resorting to physical violence and as long as you’re not actually hurting anyone by doing so, swearing is absolutely fine.
Also, there’s a nice little video on YouTube that explains how swearing can be good rather nicely.
Now I should mention that for the most part, these articles, videos and posts, talk about relieving immediate stress or stress you feel at that moment in time; it doesn’t talk about relieving deep seated stress or stress that sinks in and builds up slowly. That’s why I’m going to be conducting a little experiment. For the next few weeks I’m going to take out a little bit of time out of my day, find a secluded place where no one can disturb me (or be disturbed by me) and I’m going to screech out profanities from here to outer space. I’ll let you know whether this method helped me out or not sometime in a future post. You’re welcome to try this out for yourself, but if you do, be smart and be considerate, do it someplace where no one else will get disturbed by you and your potty mouth. Till then, happy swearing and #$@%×÷%$#@ to you.
Alternative Yoga 