Forgive for Good Health

They say to forgive is divine. It may be good for your health, too, researchers report.

The results of a new study suggest that people with forgiving natures may have lower blood pressure than less forgiving folks.

"Adopting a more forgiving stance toward others may have important health benefits," lead investigator Dr. Kathleen A. Lawler of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville told Reuters Health.

Hostility and anger have been linked with poor health and heart disease, but the relationship between forgiveness and health has not been studied as much.

The study included 108 college students who were interviewed about specific situations in which they had felt betrayed by someone else. Researchers also interviewed the students to judge whether or not they had a generally forgiving nature.

During and after the interviews, researchers monitored several vital signs in the students, including blood pressure and heart rate.

Whether a student was a forgiving type was directly related to blood pressure, Lawler and her colleagues report in the October issue of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine.

"Young adults who are less forgiving in general have higher blood pressure levels, even when resting, than more forgiving individuals," Lawler said.

She noted that resting diastolic blood pressure, the lower number in a blood pressure reading, is a strong risk factor for high blood pressure. This suggests that having a more forgiving attitude toward others may be beneficial to health, Lawler said.

The study also showed that a lack of forgiveness in a particular situation seemed to have an effect on the body. Lawler explained that students who recalled a time of betrayal that they have not been able to forgive "experience a more sustained physiological arousal" than students who remembered a betrayal that they had been able to forgive.

The Tennessee researcher added that students who had a less forgiving personality and who remembered a time when they were unable to forgive experienced the greatest increase in the arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, which comes into play during stressful situations. They were also slowest to recover after this arousal, she said.

"One important theory about illness is that those individuals who have larger stress responses and maintain them for longer periods of time, are at increased risk for a variety of chronic diseases, such as cancer and heart disease," Lawler said.

"Forgiveness may represent an important way to reduce your automatic, physiological arousal to interpersonal stressors," she added.

SOURCE: Journal of Behavioral Medicine, October 2003.

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