There is a certain satisfaction in a well-maintained grudge. The sense that you are right, that the slight has been noted, that the other person has not simply been allowed to move on unpunished. It is a very human response to being hurt. It is also, according to a substantial new body of research, quietly doing damage.
A study published in the journal NPJ Mental Health analysed data from nearly 208,000 people across 23 countries, drawn from the Global Flourishing Study, and found that people who tend to forgive others are measurably better off across a range of wellbeing outcomes a year later. The effects are not dramatic in isolation, but they are consistent and wide-ranging, and they make a compelling case for rethinking the cost of holding on.
What the study found
Participants were asked how often they forgave people who had hurt them, which gave researchers a measure of what they call dispositional forgiveness: a person’s general tendency to forgive others across different situations and relationships over time. About a year later, the same participants completed a second survey assessing 56 wellbeing outcomes across physical health, psychological wellbeing, social wellbeing and distress.
People with a higher tendency to forgive showed consistent small improvements across well-being domains. The association was strongest for psychological and social well-being. More forgiving people also reported higher optimism, a clearer sense of purpose and greater satisfaction in their relationships, three outcomes that compound each other meaningfully over time. The study did not establish that forgiveness directly caused these outcomes, but the consistency of the association across 23 countries and a sample of this size makes it difficult to dismiss.
What grudges actually do to the body
The mechanism connecting grudge-holding to poor health outcomes is not mysterious. Holding onto anger and resentment keeps the nervous system in a low-level state of activation. The body responds to perceived threat, including the psychological threat of unresolved grievance, with the same stress hormones it deploys for physical danger: cortisol and adrenaline rise, heart rate increases and muscles tighten.
When this state is chronic rather than acute, the physiological consequences accumulate. Elevated cortisol over time suppresses immune function, disrupts sleep and is associated with increased risk of anxiety and depression. Higher baseline blood pressure and persistent muscle tension follow from sustained stress activation. People who tend to hold grudges also tend to carry a more negative general outlook on the world, which compounds the psychological burden and makes the underlying stress state harder to shift.
Forgiveness is not a single act
One of the most practically useful findings from the research is that forgiveness does not need to be complete to be beneficial. The study’s lead researcher is explicit on this point: forgiveness is better understood as a capacity that develops over time than as a binary decision to be made once and definitively. Someone who is still struggling to forgive a significant hurt can still benefit from the forgiveness they have extended in other situations and other relationships.
This reframing matters because the all-or-nothing model of forgiveness is one of the primary reasons people resist it. To forgive completely feels like denying the original harm or releasing the other person from accountability. But that is not what the research describes. Forgiveness in the psychological literature is primarily about releasing the forgiver from the ongoing physiological cost of sustained resentment, not about exonerating the person who caused the harm.
The severity of the offence and the nature of the relationship both influence how difficult forgiveness is to reach, and there is no suggestion in the research that it should come easily in all situations. What the evidence supports is the value of treating it as a process rather than a destination: something that may happen gradually, unevenly and incompletely, rather than arriving fully formed as a deliberate act of will.
What this means practically
The research is not an instruction to let everything go, to pretend harm did not happen or to remain in relationships or situations that are damaging. It is a case for recognising the physical cost of maintained resentment and for considering whether the grudge is serving the person holding it.
The most straightforward takeaway is that putting pressure on yourself to forgive quickly or completely is likely to be counterproductive. The capacity for forgiveness tends to develop through the same conditions that support psychological health more broadly: time, support, processing and the gradual reorientation of attention away from the grievance and towards other things. Treating it as a direction of travel rather than a fixed endpoint is both more accurate to how it actually works and considerably kinder to the person attempting it.
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