Who drains, who restores
You can tell a lot about a friendship from how you feel on the way home. Today you run an energy audit.
The walk home
After some friends you feel lighter, more yourself, a bit braver. After others you feel tired, smaller, or slightly on edge, even when nothing obviously bad happened.
The trickiest friendships are the mixed ones: sometimes wonderful, sometimes cutting. They are the hardest to see clearly, because the good times keep you from trusting the bad feelings.
Research by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Bert Uchino found that relationships that are both supportive and upsetting, which they called ambivalent ties, were linked to higher blood pressure responses than purely supportive ones. Mixed friendships may be more stressful than they look.
Think of your friends as you go. Where does each kind of feeling after seeing someone belong?
Tap a card
Which friend restores you most, and which drains you most? What is the difference in how each of them treats you?
Take this with you
Pay attention to the walk home. It is honest.