I heard about a habit from Advita Patel, co-founder of A Leader Like Me, and my first reaction was to flinch.
Every six months she writes down everyone in her life. Family, friends, colleagues, the lot. Then she rates each one out of ten on energy. Do they give it to you, or take it from you?
My gut said: cold. Clinical. Who ranks their own mother?
Then I sat with it for a week and changed my mind.
You already rate people. You are terrible at it.
Here is the part I missed at first.
You rank people all day long. You do it with your stomach instead of a pen. A name pops up on your phone and something in your chest either lifts or sinks. You see a calendar invite and feel your jaw tighten before you read the agenda. You take the long route through the office to avoid one desk.
The scoring is already happening. It runs in the background, unexamined, and it drives your behaviour without ever telling you why.
Writing it down does not make you colder. It makes you honest. The audit brings a judgement you were already making into the light, where you get to look at it properly and ask whether it is fair.
Most of the time, it is not fair. Which is the point.
The people who drain you are not the ones you think
When I did this, the obvious names behaved as expected. The person I dread, scored low. The friend I would drive three hours for, scored high. No surprises there, and no value either.
The interesting scores were in the middle.
There is a whole category of relationship researchers call ambivalent ties. Not friends. Not enemies. Both at once. The colleague who champions you in one meeting and undercuts you in the next. The relative who is generous with money and brutal with opinions. You never know which version turns up.
Those relationships wreck you more than the openly hostile ones. Work from Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Bert Uchino found blood pressure rises more during contact with an ambivalent tie than with a supportive one, and the body starts reacting before the meeting even happens. More cardiovascular reactivity. More anxiety. More conflict.
Worse: when an ambivalent friend shows up to support you through something hard, their presence buffers nothing. Having them there measures out no better than having nobody there at all.
Read the sentence again. You spend a Tuesday evening pouring your problems out to someone, and your nervous system treats it as an empty room.
The openly difficult people get managed. You brace, you limit the exposure, you go home. The ambivalent ones slip past the guard because part of you likes them. They sit at a five or a six, and a six feels fine on paper. A six is what is quietly eating your week.
This is not about cutting people out
Here is where most people misread the exercise, and where I nearly binned it.
A list with scores looks like a hit list. Rate, rank, delete. Unfollow the fives, block the threes, build yourself a frictionless life of nines.
Advita's version is not a cull. It is a boundary-setting tool. You are deciding on dose, not on deletion.
Dose looks like this. The relative who sits at a four gets Sunday lunch twice a year instead of a standing invitation. You go with a plan and a finish time. The colleague at a five gets the meeting, not the after-work drink. The friend at a six gets your attention when you have some to spare, and not on the night before a big day.
Nobody gets a letter. Nobody gets told their number. You adjust the volume, and they never know the dial exists.
And some people stay at a four because life put them there. Your father in a hospital bed takes energy and gives none back. A four is not a verdict on his worth. It is an honest note about what the season costs you, so you feed yourself somewhere else while you carry it.
The number I did not want to look at
I will admit the bit of this exercise I dodged for two days.
Somewhere on your list is a person whose score exists because of you.
The relationship went flat and you told yourself it drifted. It did not drift. You stopped asking questions. You turned up drained and let them carry the conversation. You took the good bits and offered nothing back, and then you scored them a five for going quiet.
Be honest about which low scores you built.
Run the reverse version. If everyone on your list rated you this week, where would you land? Not on your best day. This week, with the deadlines and the short temper and the two cancellations.
I did not enjoy my answer.
The value in the audit is not the judgement of other people. It is the mirror. You see how thinly you spread yourself, how many people get the tired version of you, and how the ones you love end up last in the queue because they forgive you.
Why any of this matters more than it sounds
There is a temptation to file this under self-care fluff. Light a candle, curate your circle, feel lovely.
The evidence is heavier than fluff. The biggest review of the field, a meta-analysis of 148 studies covering 308,849 people by Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton, found people with strong social relationships had a 50% increased likelihood of survival compared with people whose connections were weak. The authors put the effect on par with smoking and above obesity.
Your relationships are not a lifestyle preference. They are a health input, sitting in the same league table as what you smoke and what you weigh.
You audit your finances. You audit your calories, your steps, your screen time. Somehow the one input with mortality data behind it gets no review at all.
How to run it without turning into a monster
Twenty minutes, twice a year. Here is the shape of it.
Write the list first, score it second
Names down the page. Everyone with regular access to you, work and home both. Do not think about numbers while you write, or you start editing the list to protect your own feelings.
Score on energy, not on affection
Ten means you leave the interaction fuller than you arrived. One means you need a lie down and a biscuit. Affection is a separate question. You love plenty of people who exhaust you.
Look for the middle, not the bottom
The ones and twos are already handled. Circle everything between four and seven. Those are your ambivalent ties, and your answer lives there.
Choose one adjustment per low score
Not a speech. One change. A shorter visit, a later reply, a meeting with an end time, a conversation you have been avoiding for a year.
Write your own name at the bottom
Score yourself as the people above would score you. Then do something about it.
The bit nobody says out loud
There is a reason this feels harsh.
We are taught relationships are unconditional, and putting a number on one feels like a betrayal of the whole idea. So we never measure, and instead we do the cowardly version: we fade. We reply slower. We stop suggesting dates. We let a friendship die of neglect and call it life getting busy.
The audit is kinder than the fade. Kinder to them, because you either fix the relationship or you set a shape you both survive. Kinder to you, because you stop bleeding energy into places you never chose.
Advita does it every six months. I have done it once, and the next one goes in the diary for spring.
Two questions before you close this. Who sits at a six in your life and takes your whole week? And whose six are you?