33% of adults who hold grudges say they regret doing so, per Trustpilot’s Helping Hands survey of 12,000 adults across six countries. There is no comparable figure for the other side: no large survey has asked whether people regret forgiving. The University of Michigan’s nationally representative survey of 1,423 adults (Toussaint, Williams, Musick and Everson, 2001) found that only 52% said they had forgiven others, and that for adults aged 45 and older forgiving was linked with better self-reported mental and physical health — it reports no regret figure and describes no “small minority” who felt worse after forgiving. The action-side 10% shown here is a placeholder that encodes direction, not a measured rate; it should not be read as evidence that one in ten forgivers regret it. The Trustpilot survey also found 70% “acknowledge” that grudge-holding harms their health, but acknowledgment is not regret — the 33% who explicitly reported regretting their grudges is the more appropriate comparison point.
The physiological case is unusually direct. Witvliet, Ludwig, and Vander Laan (2001) measured 71 participants while they alternated between grudge-rehearsal and forgiveness imagery. Grudge conditions produced significantly elevated heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, and brow tension — a sympathetic-nervous-system profile consistent with chronic stress. Rasmussen et al. (2019) confirmed the pattern at scale: across 103 samples totaling 26,043 participants, forgiveness was reliably associated with better psychological and cardiovascular health, though the correlation was modest (r roughly 0.14 to 0.18) and causality remains unestablished.
The main caveat is measurement asymmetry. No major survey has directly asked “Do you regret forgiving?”, and the cited Michigan survey reports no such figure at all — so the action-side 10% is a placeholder, not a measured or inferred rate. The 33% inaction-regret figure is a direct regret question from a consumer panel, not a clinical cohort, and a third of its grudge-holders could not even recall why they were still angry. The directional finding — that grudge-holding generates more regret than forgiving does — is consistent across multiple literatures. The precise magnitude is not established.