This matches research on pain catastrophizing vs. neutralizing - your approach of acknowledging pain directly without emotional amplification may be activating different neural pathways than those enhanced by taboo-word usage.

Yeah, I never get the compulsion to swear when doing something stupid to myself lol. People have impulse control, but it may be stronger in some than others.

Similar: I say something amusing/funny, e.g. I hit my head on a piece of metal and yelled "ah ya mother was a tin can you metal bastard" which breaks your thought from the pain. Screaming fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu... only keeps you focused.

This is the Captain Haddock method. It’s quite effective as you get distracted thinking up new terms.

hahaha, I'm going to try this

In primates there are commonly 3 noises as a reaction to danger.

Initially the work from the 70s-80s on vervet monkeys https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7433999/ which was then found to be generalized for a host of other primates

~1 for danger in the air

~1 for danger on the ground

misc for unspecified danger

I would bet that modern swearing maps to these calls in a less specific way. Equivalents of "this shite" "that arsehole" and "damnnit" may have an evolutionary origin.

I was looking for this comment!

That being a possible reason why certain words alleviate, they actually operate at a different level in our conciousness.

I use a mix of both, but when I’m in really serious pain, I also find it’s more effective when I’m just like “Wew. WOW. Yeah that’s pretty good there. Phew. Wow. WOOOW.”

I dunno why, but wow seems to work well for me.