Forgive and Forget? New Study Shows the Health Benefits of “Getting Over it”

When you have a fight with a friend or a loved one, are you the kind of person who can just ‘forgive and forget’? Or do you tend to hold a grudge?

If you’re the kind of person who finds it hard to let bygones be bygones, you might want to read the following…

The Daily Mail reports that researchers from the University of California in San Diego have found that forgiving people when they have wronged you can actually improve your own health. Yes, seriously.

Researchers asked over 200 volunteers to think about a time when they were betrayed by a friend. Half of the group were told to think about how much it angered them at the time, while the other half were encouraged to think about it from a perspective of forgiveness.

The volunteers were then distracted for five minutes before they were asked to think about the incident again, in any way that they wanted. During this exercise, the participants were hooked up to monitors which monitored their blood pressure and their heart rate.

The team, which was led by Dr Britta Larsen, discovered that the volunteers in the ‘angry’ group actually experienced an increase in their blood pressure levels, and their blood pressure remained high despite the fact that they were given time to calm down.

Although the authors of the study admitted that their experiment was pretty small, their research (which has been published in the Journal of Biobehavioural Medicines) suggested that choosing to forgive someone can actually ‘lower reactivity’ to stressful events and offer our bodies ‘sustained protection’ from the physical impact of high blood pressure.

But this isn’t the only health benefit that forgiveness can have. There is an endless amount of information on the internet which states that forgiving someone can offer you relief from stress, give you a great night’s sleep, reduce any depressive feelings you may have, reduce any physical aches and pains in your body and improve every single one of your relationships. Not bad, right?

So ladies, is it time you forgave someone?