Chuck Bryant

All right, so there's this study that Dave dug up that I thought was interesting.

I think it's flawed, but interesting.

It screams social psychology.

They took 46 people.

They divided them into two groups.

One wrote about a time when they had something, some wrong committed against them, but they forgave.

The other wrote about a time when they had something wrong committed against them, but they did not forgive.

And then they told those people to stand at the bottom of a hill to estimate how steep it was.

And also...

in a separate part of the study, to jump as high as they could.

The unforgiving group guessed that the incline was five degrees steeper on average than the forgiving, and the forgivers jumped seven centimeters higher.

So the takeaway here is you literally, it's more difficult for you, you see the world as being more difficult and steeper, and you can't jump as high, and you can't accomplish as much if you're holding onto that.

All kinds of red flags here to this study, especially when it comes to the jumping part.

Yeah.

But I thought it was interesting, the guessing the incline of the hill.

There may be something to that.

Well, yeah, and I mean it is backed up, Chuck, by the physiological studies of how stress and anger affect you and how releasing those can actually help you.

There's a lot of research that shows that you can suffer from chronic stress when you're angry all the time and that that's tied to everything from high blood pressure to diabetes to poor cardiovascular outcomes.

Yeah.

Just a whole host of chronic conditions can be traced back to chronic stress, and chronic stress can be traced back to chronic anger.