I’ve been told I curse like a sailor.
And I do. I like the F-word, the S-word, all the words that would be filed under “expletives.”
My mom thinks it’s crass. My stepdad thinks it’s unladylike. I don’t care, and I don’t think it’s a big deal.
Turns out I might be right about that, because people like me, the ones who curse freely and say whatever comes to their brain, tend to do better on a handful of measures that psychologists take pretty seriously.
1. They’re more honest, and they don’t have to try to be
Gilad Feldman, a behavioral scientist at Maastricht University, studied the relationship between profanity and honesty.
He asked 276 people how often they cursed and then measured their truthfulness using a standard personality questionnaire. The people who swore more scored higher on every measure of truthfulness. Not by a little. Consistently.
A second study analyzed 75,000 Facebook posts and found the same pattern. People who cursed more used the same linguistic markers that researchers associate with telling the truth.
You know this person. They’re the one at the table who says the thing everyone else was thinking but decided to phrase more carefully, or not say at all.
They’re not trying to be blunt. They just don’t have a second version of what they think, so the first one comes out, and it’s usually the accurate one.
2. They tend to have larger vocabularies, not smaller ones
The assumption is that people who swear a lot do it because they can’t think of a better word. Kristin Jay and Timothy Jay, two psychologists, tested that directly. They asked people to list as many curse words as they could in 60 seconds, then had them do the same thing with regular words and animal names.
The people who generated more curse words generated more regular words too. The correlation was consistent across every version of the test they ran. A big swearing vocabulary didn’t replace the regular one. It sat on top of it.
That’s because both come from the same place. The person who knows six different curse words for the same situation and can pick the right one is doing the same thing as the person who knows the difference between frustrated, exasperated, and fed up.
They’re interested in precision. They collect words the way some people collect tools, and the swearing drawer is just one more drawer in a bigger cabinet.
More Bolde Stories
3. Their pain tolerance is higher, and the F-word is the reason
Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University in England, got curious about this after hearing his wife swear through childbirth. He put 64 people through a simple experiment: hold your hand in ice water for as long as you can. Half repeated a swear word the whole time. Half repeated a neutral word like “brown.”
The swearers held on for an average of 160 seconds. The non-swearers made it to 100. That’s not a marginal difference. That’s a person lasting 60 percent longer at the same task because of what they were saying out loud.
In a later experiment, Stephens tested made-up swear words to see if any strong language would do. It didn’t. The F-word produced a 32 percent increase in pain threshold. The made-up words did nothing.
The real ones carry an emotional charge that the brain knows how to use, and that charge translates into something the body can feel.
4. They process and let go of emotions faster than people who hold back
When something frustrates you, and you say it out loud, the feeling moves.
It goes from sitting inside your chest to existing in the room, and once it’s out, it starts to lose weight.
The person who drops something and says oh, for f—’s sake is done with the frustration faster than the person who presses their lips together and holds it.
Holding an emotion in doesn’t make it go away. It keeps the body running at a higher baseline, tense and alert, waiting for the feeling to go somewhere.
The person who says the thing gives it somewhere to go. That’s a faster processing loop, and the people who use it tend to recover and move on while the polite version is still carrying it around two hours later.
5. People trust them more than non-cursers
It sounds backwards, but it follows directly from the honesty research.
If someone isn’t filtering their language, you get the signal that they’re probably not filtering the rest of what they’re saying either. You know where you stand with them, because if they thought something else, they’d have said that instead.
People who swear around you are telling you they’re not performing. And when one person stops performing, the other person tends to stop too. Both of you relax. The conversation gets more direct, and the relationship moves faster, because nobody’s spending energy on the presentation.
More Bolde Stories
6. They recover from stressful moments more easily
The ice-water experiment showed something else, beyond pain tolerance. The people who swore had elevated heart rates, a sign that their fight-or-flight response had kicked in. That sounds like a bad thing, but it’s not. It means the body was mobilizing to deal with the stress rather than sitting in it passively.
Swearing under pressure activates the same system your body uses when it needs to act fast, push through something hard, or shake off a bad moment.
The person who stubs their toe and says goddammit isn’t losing their composure. Their body is doing exactly what it’s built to do: process the stress, respond, and move on. The one who stays silent is still absorbing it ten minutes later.
7. They’re more curious, less conventional, and less interested in curating themselves
The Jay and Jay study also didn’t just measure vocabulary. It measured personality traits using the Big Five, which is the most widely used personality framework in psychology.
People who knew more swear words scored higher on openness to experience, the trait that tracks curiosity, willingness to try unfamiliar things, and comfort with ideas that don’t fit neatly into categories.
These are the people who try the restaurant nobody’s heard of. They say yes to the trip that hasn’t been planned yet. They’re comfortable not knowing how something is going to go.
That’s why they can say what they think without rehearsing it first. They’re not trying to control the outcome of the conversation any more than they’re trying to control the outcome of the weekend.
Of course, these are correlations, not guarantees. Plenty of people who swear are full of it, and plenty who don’t are wildly creative.
But the pattern across every study points in the same direction: the person who says exactly what they think, in whatever language comes to mind, tends to be doing better on the things psychologists measure than the stereotype would suggest.
