Forgive and Forget Your Way to Better Emotional Health
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iStock/Thinkstock(ROTTERDAM, Netherlands) — No doubt it can be hard to forgive some wrongs that have been done to you in life but it also may be wrong not to at least try.
After all, say researchers at Erasmus University’s Rotterdam School of Management, you might be doing yourself a world of good by not holding a grudge. The study’s authors contend that forgiveness can be beneficial to one’s mental and physical well-being.
They conducted a series of experiments to prove the theory. In one, undergrad students wrote about a time they were offended by someone and either forgave or didn’t forgive that wrong. When later asked to judge the slant of a hill, those in the forgiving group saw it as less steep as those in the other group, suggesting that they had fewer negative feelings left over to cloud their thinking.
In the other experiment, a third group was added that wrote about a neutral interaction that didn’t involve forgiveness.
When members of all three groups were then told to do a physical task such as jumping, people in the forgiving group and neutral group jumped higher than people who wrote about not forgiving an offense, meaning that their grudge, in effect, was weighing them down.
The authors concluded, “A state of unforgiveness is like carrying a heavy burden — a burden that victims bring with them when they navigate the physical world. Forgiveness can lighten this burden.”
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