Once you choose to forgive, your brain will help you move past the pain.
"To forgive others is to save yourself." A recent scientific study found that this sentence is not a flashy "comfort pill", but a real health secret. Scientists say that forgiving other makes it easier for people to forget painful experiences, free themselves from bad emotions, and restore physical and mental balance.
People who choose to forgive are more likely to forget details of past injuries, according to a scientific study published in the journal Psychological Science on May 21. This is because the mechanism of forgetting painful memories will be produced after the action of forgiveness.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews in the UK asked 30 subjects to read about 40 situations, including serious injury and theft behind their backs, and then asked each subject to rate the degree of harm caused by each behavior and to imagine how likely it would be to forgive the other if they were victims.
Two weeks later, the same group of subjects reads the same content again, but the contents were marked in red or green respectively. Participants were asked to recall the green part of the text, not the red part of the text.
Dr. Saima Noreen, the author of the paper, said it was difficult for subjects to recall the details after they chose to "forgive" in the first place. Those who chose not to forgive in the first place, even though they were asked not to recall the details in the experiment, were still quite impressive.
The results show that when a person makes a decision to forgive, the brain activates the forgetting mechanism, which makes people forget the painful memories that were once unfavorable to them. Even though it is still difficult to really forgive at once, it will be easier to forget those memories as long as you choose to forgive.
"The relationship between forgiveness and forgetting is two-way and gets more complicated over time," Noreen says. We have known for a long time that learning to forgive others has a positive impact on personal health. "
People who choose to forgive are more likely to forget details of past injuries, according to a scientific study published in the journal Psychological Science on May 21. This is because the mechanism of forgetting painful memories will be produced after the action of forgiveness.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews in the UK asked 30 subjects to read about 40 situations, including serious injury and theft behind their backs, and then asked each subject to rate the degree of harm caused by each behavior and to imagine how likely it would be to forgive the other if they were victims.
Two weeks later, the same group of subjects reads the same content again, but the contents were marked in red or green respectively. Participants were asked to recall the green part of the text, not the red part of the text.
Dr. Saima Noreen, the author of the paper, said it was difficult for subjects to recall the details after they chose to "forgive" in the first place. Those who chose not to forgive in the first place, even though they were asked not to recall the details in the experiment, were still quite impressive.
The results show that when a person makes a decision to forgive, the brain activates the forgetting mechanism, which makes people forget the painful memories that were once unfavorable to them. Even though it is still difficult to really forgive at once, it will be easier to forget those memories as long as you choose to forgive.
"The relationship between forgiveness and forgetting is two-way and gets more complicated over time," Noreen says. We have known for a long time that learning to forgive others has a positive impact on personal health. "