Transcripts

Dr. Fred Luskin:
Let's say there's somebody that did you wrong and you ruminate over it, or you think about it a lot, or you remember it twelve times a day. Every single time you remember it, you're putting your body under stress.

Dr. Fred Luskin, author of the book Forgive for Good, says holding a grudge is a strategy for coping with the hurt, but it's not very effective. So if you are holding a grudge, ask yourself…

How much of your attention do you want to place on something that happened in 1999? That's really the question. How much of your limited time, energy, space, do you want to spend on something that's gone? When you put it that way, most people don't want to spend as much as they do.

And Dr. Luskin says people who hold grudges have to ask themselves another question.

What good is this doing them? So you're sitting here, ruminating. How is that helping your life? Is it at all effective for what you want? And the answer is no. You don't have to point that hard to get people to see that there might be better strategies.

One simple strategy for letting go of a grudge is to simply relax.

And in fact, we've done some studies with the family of murder victims, so we're talking about a pretty serious offense with a lot of obsessing, and it's true. The more you can physically relax your body and distract your mind, the easier it becomes for these thoughts to just come and go.

For transcripts, visit our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."