July 2026 Substack: When the Body Speaks First

Wondering what swearing reveals about being human.

29 July 2026

Swearing may be one of the few ways we instinctively regulate ourselves that almost everyone practises and almost nobody recommends. I wonder why?

I certainly never learnt it from a workshop or a book. As far back as I can remember, colourful profanity has simply been part of my relationship with the world.

I have always had a rather intimate relationship with swearing. This may come as a surprise to people who meet me. I am, by nature, a quiet and calm person, and people often comment on that. Some may assume that I am rather well behaved too. Then, quite unexpectedly, an eloquent, full-bodied Swiss German expletive bursts forth after I have dropped something on my foot, or a colourful Italian phrase appears in traffic.

The calm and the colourful language of profanity belong to the same person.

What has always fascinated me is that I never consciously decide to swear. My body simply gets there first. Only a fraction of a second later, my thinking mind catches up with what has just been expressed, and I often find myself thinking, Oh, that was impressive.

What made me hesitate to write about it was not the swearing itself. I had long known that swearing did something for me. The challenge was finding a way to honour that experience without reducing something deeply human to another nervous system regulation technique.

Long before I had words like regulation, co-regulation or neurophysiology, I already knew that a well-timed Swiss German stream of profanity could help me through a moment of pain, fright or frustration.

But I also knew it wasn’t that simple. Swearing can bring a moment of release, but, when overused, it can also keep us caught in activation. The more I reflected on my own relationship with profanity, the less interested I became in asking whether swearing is good or bad for us. That felt like the wrong question.

Instead, I found myself wondering. Why these words? Why do they arrive with such remarkable speed? Why do they seem to know exactly what they want to express before my thinking mind has caught up? And why do they appear in every culture, in every language, carrying such extraordinary emotional weight?

Perhaps the real question was never whether swearing belongs at the table of nervous system regulation. Perhaps it was what swearing might reveal about being human.

My curiosity eventually prompted me to see whether anyone had actually done any research on swearing. I was fascinated to discover that there is an entire body of research exploring it. Among the researchers who kept appearing was Dr Richard Stephens from Keele University, whose work looks at swearing, pain, physical performance and emotion.

Alongside these experimental studies, I also came across a clinical observation that immediately brought back a memory from my years as a physiotherapist. I remembered a gentleman who had suffered a stroke. He understood far more than he could express. Conversation consisted mostly of sounds and fragments.

Until he became frustrated.

Then, quite suddenly, there came a beautifully articulated outburst of profanity.

I was fascinated how someone who struggled to produce the simplest sentence suddenly swore with such ease and precision.

Later I discovered that this is a well-recognised clinical observation. People who have had strokes affecting certain language areas of the brain may lose much of their ordinary speech while still retaining the ability to swear fluently.

One possible explanation is that swearing appears to rely, at least in part, on neural pathways that differ from those involved in ordinary propositional speech, drawing more heavily on older emotional and subcortical networks.

I don’t know whether that fully explains it. But it certainly deepened my curiosity. Perhaps swearing belongs to a much older conversation between body, language and culture than we usually realise.

That possibility stayed with me. It also changed the way I listened to my own profanity. I realised that I don’t swear in just one language. Swiss German, High German, Italian and English all live somewhere inside me, yet they don’t arrive under the same circumstances, nor do they feel the same in my body.

Reading about the astonishing creativity of German compound swear words (such as Intelligenzallergiker) made me realise that my lukewarm relationship with High German probably says more about me than it does about the language. Swiss German is the language of home. High German remained, for me, the language of school. My nervous system seems to know the difference.

Italian entered my life later, when I was in my teens. Yet over the years it became woven into some of my happiest memories—warmth, laughter, belonging, first love and lifelong friendships. Somewhere along the way it settled closer to my heart than my head. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that, when my body speaks first, it sometimes chooses Italian. Italian profanity rarely arrives alone. It seems to recruit my hands, my face and the rest of my body as well.

English arrived later still, when I moved to South Africa. It has become the language of my work, of friendships and of everyday life. Yet when it comes to swearing, it often feels more like an adopted language than an inherited one. I can certainly say fuck, but I notice that I usually think about it first. It rarely pours out of me before thought. My body still seems to reach instinctively for the languages that knew me first.

The more I reflected on this, the less these words felt arbitrary. They began to feel almost archaeological, carrying layers of history beneath their surface. They have accumulated emotional charge over centuries. Generation after generation has invested them with fear, shame, outrage, disgust, reverence or transgression.

Perhaps that is where their power lies. Not simply in the words themselves, but in the centuries of human feeling they continue to carry.

Once I began looking through that lens, I started noticing their influence in all sorts of unexpected places.

They can interrupt an argument before it becomes a physical fight. But when shared between friends, they can create an unexpected sense of belonging. Language that would be deeply offensive in one relationship can become a sign of affection or trust in another.

One experimental finding particularly intrigued me. Swearing appears to increase pain tolerance and physical endurance, but only when the words still carry genuine emotional force.

Apparently, the taboo matters.

Reading Isla Dewar, I smiled. She seemed to be observing the very same phenomenon from an entirely different place when she wrote about the word Fuck:

“Pity. It used to be such a handy little stinger of an Anglo-Saxon outcry, but overuse has rendered it bland. Now it is a Black Forest gâteau of a swear word; common as cake and completely without meaning.”

It made me wonder whether our bodies are responding not simply to the word itself, but to the living relationship we have with it.

There is another paradox that intrigues me. My own swearing leaves me with a deep sense of satisfaction that feels remarkably like regulation. Yet loud swearing from someone else frightens me terribly.

For me, this is where swearing becomes more than physiology. It becomes relationship.

We live in webs of relationship. My nervous system is constantly responding not only to what happens within me, but also to the tone of your voice, the expression on your face, the pace of your movements and, yes, the words you choose.

My body has every right to speak. But it is always speaking into relationship, into culture and into histories that began long before I was born.

Of course, the same words can carry very different meanings depending on how they are used. Profanity can strengthen a sense of warmth, humour and belonging. It can also create distance, establish power, humiliate, threaten or wound. Once again, relational context changes everything.

Another finding intrigued me for its practical implications. Swearing appears to create a brief reduction in inhibition. I sometimes wonder whether quiet expletives before walking into a room full of strangers or before giving a public talk can make the body feel just a little more ready. Not because swearing is a performance strategy, but because, for a fleeting moment, it seems to loosen something that fear has tightened. I suspect I’ll be trying that before my next talk.

Over the years I have noticed that while the creativity of my profanity remains wonderfully consistent, its frequency changes. When the Swiss German expletives become more frequent, they invite my curiosity.

My profanity has become something of an activation thermometer. It often lets me know that I have become a little less open to the world before I have fully realised it myself. These days I have become rather fond of listening.

Sometimes my body may be asking for a forceful release. At other times it may be asking for rest, movement, company or silence. The question is not which strategy is best. The invitation is to recognise what this particular moment is asking of me.

The same curiosity has gradually found its way into my work. When I sense a coaching client holding back an enormous emotional charge, I occasionally wonder what might happen if we invited profanity to the table—not as aggression, not as performance, but simply as one possible language of the body.

“If your body could speak without worrying about what is polite, what might it want to say?”

Sometimes people laugh, then swear or release a deep guttural sound.

Sometimes they don’t. It may not be the language their body is reaching for at that moment.

Both tell us something. From there, we simply become curious together about what is emerging and what might bring a little more ease.

My intention has never been to convince anyone to swear more or less. My curiosity has always been drawn elsewhere. What might our bodies already know long before our thinking minds catch up?

Perhaps nervous system literacy is less about collecting new techniques and more about developing the discernment to know what our bodies are asking of us in each particular moment.