You Can Stop Holding Grudges

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Studies suggest that instead of stewing, forgive—you will enhance your well-being and health.

Much research demonstrates that conflict in your inner circle takes a physical toll. It's not just teens who stress over social problems. Feeling out of sorts with anyone you care about is rough at any age and may be hardest for seniors.

But you can protect yourself by putting aside anger and judgment. Do it for yourself. That means forgiving people who wronged you, whether or not they apologize or you want to continue the relationship. It's about letting go.

It's Good For Everyone

Maybe you've always held grudges and see your anger as a strength. You're thinking that forgiveness is for other people--not you. In a meta-analysis of studies around the world covering more than 26,000 people in all, including students, combat veterans, divorced mothers, and more. Researchers concluded that forgiveness improved one's outlook and that this reduced stress on the heart, cutting symptoms like high blood pressure. Other research backs up the idea that it doesn't matter who you are; forgiveness is good for you.

In one example, in a study of people aged 50 and up in Detroit, those who said they had been hurt by someone else were more likely to report health issues. The health effects were more severe if the transgressor wasn't their partner or spouse (towards whom, the researchers suggested, they're probably more forgiving).

People who found it easy to forgive were more resilient, and the hurt had to be severe to affect their health. They were different in another way: It didn't matter who had hurt them, as they could still forgive.

What If Your Life Has Been Hard?

You might think, "Easy for you to say, my life has been too rough to go around forgiving." However, according to Time, forgiveness may help put you on an even playing field with people who haven't had as many troubles, erasing the link between stress and illness.

This might be because forgiving people adopt better-coping skills when they feel stressed, or their bodies may actually respond less to the negative event.

"There is an enormous physical burden to being hurt and disappointed," says Karen Swartz, M.D., a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Chronic anger affects your heart rate, blood pressure, and immune response—and those bodily reactions feed into depression, heart disease, and diabetes, among other illnesses.

Can Forgiveness Be Learned?

Frederic Luskin, director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, reports that depressive symptoms dropped 40 percent after forgiveness training with Protestants and Catholics from Northern Ireland who had lost a family member in the violence there.

Luskin has drawn inspiration from a book by the Tibetan Buddhist leader, the Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness. He explained that one of the best ways to guarantee unhappiness is "walking around with an unresolved grudge against something."

Luskin says,

Another one that leads to unhappiness is bitterness, that people feel life hasn’t been fair to them. And a third that we see all the time is just self-pity, like poor me, it didn’t work out the way I hoped.

If you tend to hang on to grudges, you can train yourself out of them, Swartz says. It's your choice: Do you want to dwell on hurts or try to see the good in others?

Forgiveness does not mean condoning, forgetting, or excusing bad behavior or denying or minimizing your feelings. It simply means that you don't dwell on those feelings.

Schwartz says,

There are some things that are simply too horrible to forgive and to forget—like violence against a child, abuse. Forgiving isn’t giving absolution where you say, it’s done, we never have to think about it again. If someone’s done something really thoughtless, you think about them differently. You trust them differently. You have a different relationship with them.

Let's say your husband gambled away all your savings and is now fighting a severe cancer, leaving you responsible for huge bills. Your goal is to let go of the pain because that's better for you. It really doesn't matter what he "deserves."

The core of religion of all kinds is compassion, and each tradition offers different methods. Prayer or meditation can take the edge off. You can try a ritual: Writing a letter to him expressing your hurt and anger, burning the letter, and writing another letter to him expressing forgiveness.

Forgiveness Essential Reads

The Mystery of a Genuine Apology

On Being Prepared to "Spontaneously" Forgive the Unexpected

If you prefer speech to writing, you might express your forgiveness to a confidante, not necessarily your husband.

Don't expect an apology or specific changes in him. You're setting yourself up for more disappointment and hurt. You will also need to forgive yourself. Thoughts like "How did I pick this creep?" or "He did it because I'm fat" are hard on your body, too.

You can forgive him and also stop loving him as your husband. Divorce doesn't mean you are carrying around the feeling that he's a monster.

The key is where you let your mind go. Your body will respond to those thoughts. Swartz explains negative thoughts make your body tense, which will "spill over into your thoughts about lots of other relationships" and make you generally suspicious. You deserve better.

A version of this story appears at Your Care Everywhere.