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Coping with rheumatoid arthritis pain takes a toolbox of many different remedies and trips. In addition to the standards, such as medication, heating pads, ice packs, and careful stretching, mine also includes swearing like a sailor. My new essay for  CreakyJoints Canada shares my swearing story and tips on how to use curse words to cope.

“If you’re passing through Toronto and see a blue cloud dotted with flashing lightning bolts hanging over the downtown core, it’ll be me. I swear a lot when I’m having a bad pain day. My approach varies depending on the source of the pain.

When my chronic rheumatoid arthritis (RA) pain start ratcheting up, it’s accompanied by a steady stream of muttered F-bombs and other English curse words. But when I hurt myself, such as accidentally not stopping my wheelchair before I drive into a wall foot first, it’s an explosion of loud Danish expletives. In moments of shock and intense pain, I slam back to the first “bad” words I learned growing up in Denmark but use my second language for lower-level pain, which of course can still be very painful indeed. 

When I’m in pain, swearing makes me feel better. For most of my life, I thought that was due to the emotional release, but I also tried to limit it, at least outside my home. Partly because it’s not seen as polite — especially in women — but swearing also tends to be seen as an outsized and unreasonable reaction to pain. For a while, the medical field viewed cursing when in pain as “catastrophizing,” that is, a maladaptive response. 

And then things changed. 

In the last several years, researchers have started looking at swearing in connection to pain. Letting out a loud curse word when you hurt yourself is a common human response unrelated to living with chronic pain. When people are angry or stub a toe, the first sound out of their mouth is often a curse word.  

Yet, most of us grew up learning not to swear and try very hard not to do so, at least in public company. A UK researcher wondered why we keep swearing, when there is so much social pressure not to. In a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, he discovered that swearing helped increase pain threshold and tolerance by as much as 33 percent. This research has been replicated many times and there is now a growing shift to discuss the benefits of swearing for coping with pain.”

Read my CreakyJoints Canada essay on how I use swearing to cope with RA and tips to create a better life with RA with curse words.