Forgiveness may be the key to helping you manage stress. A small preliminary study looked at the correlation between forgiveness, stress, and mental health. Researchers hypothesized that the ability to cope could make stress more manageable. “[They] looked at the effects of lifetime stress on a person’s mental health, and how more forgiving people fared compared to people who weren’t so forgiving. No surprise, people with greater exposure to stress over their lifetimes had worse mental and physical health. But the researchers also discovered that if people were highly forgiving of both themselves and others, that characteristic alone virtually eliminated the connection between stress and mental illness.”