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Forgiveness & Health ~ Healing the Heart & Body
Long Term Anger Can Lead to Adrenal Fatigue and Other Health Risks, While Forgiveness Can Heal the Mind & Body
Date: 2/13/2006 4:38:48 PM ( 18 y ) ... viewed 3538 times It can be the toughest thing you will ever do - forgiving someone who has wronged you. In fact, it is especially hard when there was seemingly no reason for it, just willful hatred or careless cruelty. But science is just now catching up to what great spiritual leaders have been telling us for generations - choosing to forgive may be a matter of life and death.
Frederic Luskin heads the Forgiveness Project at Stanford University. The Project’s goal is to study forgiveness and the many affects it can have on individuals, families, and society at large. They developed a method that teaches average people how to forgive those who have wronged them. This takes place over six sessions of intense work. Afterwards participants said they felt less angry and hurtful, more hopeful, spiritually content and better able to handle their own emotional ups and downs.
Luskin has linked the opposite of forgiveness, long term anger, to adrenal fatigue. He says that low levels of long term resentment cause the body to produce adrenaline, over time the adrenals burn out leaving the person feeling exhausted and depleted all the time.
Also Luskin says that cholesterol and blood pressure both are continuously elevated in those that hold on to anger for years at a time, both of which are health risks. Long term anger also causes the body to release certain enzymes that can negatively affect the heart muscles.
The good news is that forgiveness is possible. The Project has sponsored scientific studies that show that forgiveness can have beneficial health rewards. Participants in the Forgiveness Project showed much better cardiovascular health than before, i.e. blood pressure and other measurements of heart health measurably improved after people chose to forgive. It also shows that the opposite is true - holding anger inside and refusing to forgive creates negative cardiac health readings and increases the risk of a heart attack or heart disease. The obvious conclusion is that choosing forgiveness as a way of life may well extend your life, and allow you to have a healthier and happier life on this earth.
Many scientific studies show that strong social and interpersonal relationships often coincide with good physical health. Luskin believes that because forgiveness improves ones relationships it also carries with it all of those benefits of strong social ties, and those benefits are both emotional and physical.
To read about the Forgiveness Project go here:
http://www.almanacnews.com/morgue/1999/1999_06_09.forgive.html
http://mednews.stanford.edu/stanmed/1999summer/forgiveness.html
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