Forgiveness essentially means letting go of the anger against a particular person. It means removing of negative thoughts against a person in order to truly forgive the person from your heart and mind. This way you reach a loving state of mind that will be able to lift you from various mental and physical burdens. Read about some of the benefits of forgiveness here in order to know more.
- Lowering of stress levels – Forgiveness leads to lowering of the amounts of cortisol in blood. Those having forgiving perspectives tend to have much lesser physiological stress responses.
- Having a healthy heart – Those who hold grudges against others tend to have much higher heart rates. On the other hand, those who are more forgiving have lower heart rates. This means that holding onto anger against others will make your heart do much more work.
- Lowering pain – A forgiving heart tends to lower pain, both emotional and physical. It appears that there is a kind of relationship between forgiveness and various important aspects of persistent pain and living with that pain.
- Lowering of blood pressure – Once you let go of that anger, it can lead to lowering of the blood pressure.
- Enjoying long life – Study has revealed that those who are able to forgive tend to live much longer.
- Perform challenging physicals tasks better – When people are not forgiving, they tend to carry a huge burden with them as they navigate this physical world. The benefit of forgiveness here is that they can lighten this burden. This is because lack of forgiveness leads to a decrease in the availability of cognitive resources like glucose and others. This is the stuff that is required to cope with various physical challenges that include climbing a hill, jumping and so on. Forgiveness also brings forth an increased feelings of possessing personal power. This gets manifested in terms of much greater physical strength.
- Better sleep – It is no secret that a disturbed and unhappy mind can never achieve a good night’s sleep. Disturbed thoughts will be there in the subconscious mind that may lead to nightmares, difficulty in falling asleep and various other sleeping disorders. Good sleep is essential for our emotional and physical well-being. A person who has not slept well will not be able to perform tasks properly the next day. This would affect his productivity, relationships, concentration, focus and even his physical appearance. The benefits of forgiveness include sleeping better that would let you perform better and look your best always.
- Less medication – Being in constant agony due to the misdeeds done by others and remembering this all the time leads to a lot of physical and emotional problems. Any physical problems tend to get manifested in a big way. The focus is always on the physical discomfort and that tends to become much bigger than it actually is. Thus pain tends to get aggravated. This requires more and stronger medication. In addition, any kind of emotional stress also gets aggravated due to the negative thoughts already lingering in the mind. This way the emotional stress increases manifold. In fact, it may increase so much that medication may be required to keep things under control. Thus in order to avoid this kind of addiction to medication, forgiveness can be a great help.
It is quite obvious that forgiveness has its benefits. But it is not easy. Even though a person may admit to forgive, this may just be a statement. True forgiveness has to come from the heart. Only then will it reach the mind and the benefits of forgiveness will become visible.
