The Feelings Wheel
Most of us were not taught how to understand and manage our feelings.
Your emotions are not something to be ashamed of. You don’t have to control your feelings. You don’t have to feel shame for them. Your feelings are something to learn from and work with.
To do this, you can use the Feelings Wheel, which is a tool invented by Dr. Gloria Wilcox to help people to understand and label their feelings.
You can download a free PDF of the New Happy Feelings Wheel, along with a helpful guide on how to use it and work with your emotions.
Here is how to use the feelings wheel.
Start at the center of the wheel and identify which of the emotion families you think that you are currently feeling.
Then, go out closer to the edges and see how specific you can get.
Which emotion is closest to what you are feeling right now? If you’re having trouble, try eliminating the ones that you know that you aren’t feeling.
Then, label it out loud. Say, “I am feeling…”
Give yourself a few moments to pause and sit with this feeling. Allow yourself to notice how it feels in your body, the thoughts you are thinking, and how it changes as you’re paying attention to it.
Extensive research has found that labeling your emotions is one of the best things you can do to improve your mental health. Studies from UCLA and other institutions have found that putting your feelings into words makes them easier to cope with. For example:
Rating your anger on a scale of 1-5 reduces your heart rate, a measure of distress.
Describing your emotions when dealing with a phobia increases your courage in facing it.
Adding a label to an emotion (like "that's sadness" or "this is fear") decreases the activity in your amygdala, which is where your fight-or-flight response comes from.
The more specific you can be, the better. Learning to label your emotions at a higher level of granularity is also shown to help you regulate and work with them more effectively.
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