Swearing may help you do your @#!%ing job.
Yeah, you read that correctly.
Specifically, a few choice and colorful words vent the psychological steam that can cloud thinking and hamstring productivity, according to a new paper in Psychosomatics journal. Swearing also conveys the sort of aggression that is rewarded with honors and promotions in high-stress workplaces.
Dick Fuld, apparently, was onto something.
The authors, both psychiatrists, focused on swearing in hospitals, noting that curses have the power "both to hurt and heal." On the plus side, they wrote that expletives offer a "channel of catharsis" that purges "negative emotion."
In other words, some profanity actually clears the head, a finding that echoes a 2009 study on swearing. In that report, a team of British scientists found that subjects who plunged their hands into frigid waters where able to stay exposed to the extreme cold substantially longer if they were swearing at the time. Those uttering unprofane words pulled their hands from the water a minute sooner, on average. The expletives provided a sense of control and literally distracted the brain from perceiving pain.
"Swearing does provide a sort of release that other language doesn't provide," said Dr. Daniel Zimmerman, one of two authors of the report. "Doctors get used to blocking out their emotional responses and those emotions do tend to build up. Swearing provides a kind of cathartic function to clear them out."
The Psychosomatics report said profanity also offers a particularly effective way to communicate a point and connect with clients. Doctors dealing with difficult patients, apparently, find that a dose of profanity is often a perfect cure.
"I swear all the time," Zimmerman said. "I feel that the more comfortable I get with a patient, the more I swear around them. It's a way of signaling intimacy and confederacy."
So anyone who has ever watched a bull market stampede a short position should feel vindicated in letting loose an F-bomb or two. Who knows, it might even get you a promotion.
Write to Kyle Stock