What are the feel wheels and how to use them for personal development and well-being?

The Wheels of Emotions are popular tools used by therapists, educators and coaches to help people identify and name their emotions. The emotion wheel charts can help you name your emotions and help you understand what you are feeling. These ‘feelings wheels’ or wheels of emotions are like colorful emotional catalogues. They are fun and easy opportunities to open up for emotional progress.

An emotion wheel charts can be helpful for starting conversations and making connections between particular emotional experiences, the triggers and different mindsets. Emotion Wheels are simplifications and shouldn’t be considered as objective, scientific assessment tools. They are mapping a personal territory, a personal experience and it is OK to feel in any way.

This article explains the Wheel of Emotions concept and concentrates on how to use emotion wheels to increase your vocabulary for emotions and your emotional intelligence .

Short summary:

• What is an emotion wheel ?
• How does an emotional wheel work?
• How You can use the feel wheel to boost personal development ?
• How You can use the emotion wheel to boost well-being ?
• Do the emotion wheels work?
• Personal insights, ideas conclusions

What is the Emotion Wheel Chart or Feelings Circle?

The Wheel of Emotions is similar to a map that guides you in your journey of self-discovery and emotional intelligence. It shows you the emotional territories available for discovery. We can look on emotion wheels as catalogues of all the main emotions what humans experience.

Emotion wheels will usually look like a round pie chart with a lots of colors. It looks very similar to color theory charts. Although it is usually represented as a round colorful wheel or a flower with colorful petals, basically it is a simple list of emotions in a visually appealing form.

The circular graph is separated into inner circles and outer circles to represent larger emotional categories and the intensity of the feelings and emotions. Some wheels have 6 core emotions and some others have 8 main emotional categories. In the center will be usually the most general categorization, the core emotions and as we move toward the outer circles we will find more specific variants of these core emotions.

Original and somewhat scientific models for emotion wheels were developed back in the 80’s and the most accepted models are:

• The Plutchik Wheel of Emotion
• The Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW)
• The Feelings Wheel by Doctor Gloria Willcox

Note: we are using in this post emotion wheel and feelings wheel interchangeably, however strictly speaking, Willcox’s model is the Feeling Wheel and Plutchik’s model is the Emotion Wheel. That matters for the academic literature, but in everyday language it is used interchangeably.

I’ve come across a very detailed version called the Feel Wheel developed, by Geoffrey Roberts. Based on the Plutchik Wheel this is also a colorful wheel shape showing emotional words. This wheel has 7 primary emotions in the middle: general bad feeling, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear Disgust, Surprise and their secondary and tertiary emotions.

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How to pick the best wheel for you?

Emotion wheels and feelings wheels have become popular tools both in therapy and education, so there are countless versions of them these days. Some wheels show only the negative feelings. Some versions present only 6 core emotions while others have a lot of layers and details to them. Which model works best for you depends on what is the purpose of the use

If you are just starting out with emotion wheels and emotional intelligence education, it is best to stick with the simpler version of the wheel of emotion. These simple versions usually differentiate 6-8 core emotions and a number of variations to that. You will have about 24-36 emotions on them and that is perfectly fine for learning the basics of emotional literacy.

As you gain knowledge and skill in recognizing and naming your emotions you can try to use the more complicated emotion wheels. Some of these complex wheels have multiple categorizations and up to 130 emotions listed on them.

The Complexity of Emotions and the Use of the Emotion Wheels

Emotions are one of the most complicated matters in the study of human psychology. Emotions and feelings just like bodily sensations are indicating a very personal and very temporary state of ours. It is a changing, dynamic indication of how we feel, how we react to the life and the people that surround us. Researchers and psychologist have differentiated over 30,000 different emotions that we can feel. And as if that wasn’t enough to navigate and understand, they realized that emotions do not appear pure and singular. Usually what we experience is an emotional complexity, meaning that we can feel two things at the same time.

For example anger is often mixed up with grief over loss, pride and fear. In difficult and complex situations the ability to identify and name the emotions is many times a catalyst by itself. People often feel relief just by being able to name what they are feeling and put a label on what is going on inside them.

The Feelings Wheel or Feelings Circle were developed and are still improved by psychotherapists and psychologists to simplify expressing the emotional experience. The emotional wheels provide a simplified and therefore easier way to put words to emotions and care for mental health. No tool and no chart can perfectly capture the emotional energy as of now, but we can look on them as a jumping-off point, a foundation to build on and a conversation starter.

The Emotion Wheels can be used as reference sheets during educating and coaching sessions. There are some versions which function as worksheets, where some of the layers are filled with emotional labels but the more specific layers are left empty so one can fill it in with their own emotional words, sensations and experiences. Human emotional experience is same but different at the same time, therefore it is hard to come up with scientific, objective measurements for such personal experiences.

How can the Wheel of Emotions be used for personal development?

The emotion wheel is a tool you can use in many areas of your life from self-discovery to team work. This colorful representation of emotions is a usefull tool, when one tries to understand and verbalize an emotional situation. The Emotion Wheel is a basically a colorful chart with emotional labels on it, that enables you to recognize and label your emotions.

We are emotional beings, but often times we don’t really know what emotions we are feeling. Before we can learn to manage and regulate our emotions, we have to first become aware, identify and understand what emotions we are experiencing. Most often people struggle with expressing their emotions and find it difficult to name what they are feeling. Some people have disconnected themselves from their emotions and created a mental distance, a space between their intelligence, logic and their heart. It was for a good reason to do so, but now it is hard for them to acknowledge that they are having emotions at all.

Using an emotional wheels might help emotionally disconnected people to reestablish the connection between what they feel, how they think and how their body reacts to emotions. Feel wheels can make sense of your feelings — and this can be a great starting point for making emotional progress. Working with the emotional wheel can enhance both your emotional awareness and your emotional vocabulary. Understanding and naming your emotions brings you one step closer to becoming able to respond to them efficiently and meaningfully.

PURPUSE AND USES OF THE EMOTION WHEEL

• Self-awareness -The Emotions wheel is a helpful tool to use when you are trying to identify what you are feeling. Sometimes when we experience stress and frustration there are usually more layers to it. It might come from fear, it might come from anger, it might come from boredom, self-criticism, etc. Emotional awareness is an important step towards developing your emotional intelligence. Emotion wheels can help you discover what might be the core emotion that you are currently feeling. Discovering and being able to describe emotional experience in a more nuanced and clear form can give you a greater sense of control and self-esteem.
• Self-control – Being able to clearly identify how we are feeling can reduce the negativity of the experience. Feel wheels open opportunities for you to make a basic, simplified sense of the mind-body-heart sensations during an emotional turmoil. Naming and labelling triggers the rational mind.
• Interpersonal Communication – The Wheel of Emotions can be used as a reference sheet, because it can help you explain your emotions to other people. It is very difficult to try to explain yourself to others when you don’t understand yourself. Saying that you are ‘Feeling bad’ might not reveal the depth of your experience to the other person. Some people develop a rich emotional vocabulary, good communication and social skills, but most people are not socialized in psychologically wise, emotionally educated environments. But we can all learn to grow our emotional vocabulary as we move trough life experiencing the full emotional range. As you learn about yourself it becomes easier and easier to develop good family relationships, communicate gently with others and with yourself.
• Empathy – The Wheel of emotions can be used as a tool to understanding how others feel. The emotional awareness can help establish common ground and ease the understanding of each other’s perspectives.

Using the Feelings Wheel to Boost Well-Being​

Emotions and feelings impact our lives, our performance our self-esteem, yet we rarely spend time on managing them. We just take them as they come and think that this is the normal human experience. Modern psychology is telling us otherwise. It is teaching us that emotions can be handled and managed, they are under our control and we can all develop the emotional intelligence and the skills needed.

How to put a Wheel of Emotions into practice for boosting wellbeing?

• You can track your emotional experiences – daily, weekly
• You can set aside time to attend to your feelings regularly – journaling
• You can get insights for self-discovery and recognize your patterns and triggers
• You can learn to pay attention to the positive aspects
• You can use it to communicate more clearly with others
• You can use it in parenting for developing your kids emotional awareness and vocabulary

1. Using Emotional Wheel for Tracking Emotions

Tracking emotions is a practice many people use to get in touch with their emotional side. It is typical to deal with emotions by numbing them, pushing them down into a ” deal with them later” box. The problem is that numbing emotions is a temporary solution and sooner or later they will burst out. We have to deal with them at some point in time and it is usually – not always – better to tend to them as they come. Sometimes the intensity of the emotion makes it more reasonable to deal with it in segments and not all at once. There are hundreds of free emotional trackers available online. There are number scales and there are color based trackers so everyone can find what fits their personality best.

The Emotional wheel serves like a background, a catalogue that you can open up and look up emotional words, bodily sensations related to emotions and discover how colorful your emotional life truly is. It can serve as a tool, a broad palette to choose from what currently resonates best with you. The idea is to give yourself time to sense which words resonate with you. It is about letting yourself feel the emotions without judgement. It is about letting the emotions rise up instead of being pushed down. You can do this without an emotion wheel but for many people using these charts really helps.

Let’s see an example. Let’s say you are tracking your emotions every day or maximum every 3-4 days. You realize that you are feeling bad these days but you can’t really tap into what is going on. There is no obvious reason for feeling down and so you don’t know what is causing it. The reasons are probably inside and therefore harder to discover. Recognizing that you are feeling down these days is a good starting point. The next step is discovering what ‘bad’ really means in this situation.

You can go about it one way by taking the wheel and starting to explore the broad categories. When it is a mild, general emotion it is easier to identify the broad category on the emotional wheel. When it is an intense emotion it will be easier to identify the more specific category. Let yourself FEEL. Give yourself a little time, take a few deep breath and let it show itself. Are you frustrated, or stressed, are you feeling fearful or angry? Is this feeling more like grief and sadness or is it more like loathing and disgust? When you have found the words that have resonated with you, than you can take the next step. You can think for example on things that felt similar these days. A conversation with a friend? a story that you heard form a persona t the workplace?

With this techniques you are basically making the connection between what you are feeling and what triggers you. You can collect these ideas of self-discovery in a journal. Journaling can keep a structure to your personal development.

2. Using Emotion Wheel in Journaling and Self-discovery

Using an emotional wheel together with emotional journaling enables us to identify what we feel and explore why we feel the way we do. It promotes greater self-awareness and understanding. Let’s say you identified that generally you are feeling bad and it is more like anger and frustration that you feel.

Now you can use a journal to write it out. What/who made you angry these days? Think about situations that triggered anger in you. You partner, your pets, noises, your collogues, some behavior etc. Name all of them from the last 3 days. Where they the reason or where they the distraction? Why they ” make you angry’ ? Is the trigger around you or in you? Maybe the anger was there 1st. Maybe it is a memory that triggered you and all the other things where just distractions, things you used to get the anger explained without having to look on that memory? Maybe you are not finding closure on a situation because you are still angry, but you are not letting yourself feel angry so you use other factors to blame your anger on.

We are complex and complicated beings and there are no simple explanations to our emotional experiences. none can take this journey of self-knowledge instead of us. It is our journey to discover and understand how we work.

3. Using the Emotion Wheel to Focus on the Positives

Of course the Wheel of emotions doesn’t only work in the negative direction. It can be used as a positivity tool too. You can learn a lot by exploring your positive feelings and emotions too. You can spend time discovering which emotions you value. Using the positive sides of the emotion wheel one can trigger the development of positive attention. It takes time to develop a positive mindset. It takes time to change the focus and to train our minds to pay attention in ways that benefit us emotionally.

You can integrate for example the feel wheel in your gratitude practice. Looking at the positive emotions listed there, name 3 thing that makes you feel that way. let’s say you look on happiness, for example. What makes you feel happy in general. Did you feel happiness these days? What were the triggers? When did you feel happy on the last 3-4 days? What was going on, who were there? It can help you identify the things, people, situations , patterns that make you feel happy, calm, easy-going, clear minded, joyous, fun, interested, excited. You can find the positive triggers just as easily as you can find your negative triggers.

Do the Emotion Wheels Work?

A funny answer to this would be : No, they do not – You are working ( not the wheel). In other words, the so called Emotion Wheel, Feel wheel or Feelings circle is basically a visually nice list of emotional words. This list can be easily used as a basis for psychology and mental health exercises and can be applied in education, coaching and self-help in combination with other methods and techniques. It works well for creating a starting point for a longer journey of understanding and development.

They can be used for creating basic psychological background and understanding and introduce you to the large categories and the variety of the emotional experience. The part that works with the Emotion Wheel is actually letting the emotion be felt, letting it show itself so we can recognize it and name it. But once we got the label one it we stand there asking: so what?

The emotion wheel is a starting point so some people, who are emotionally more aware, will feel that for them a feel wheel is basically useless. But there are many people in a state of numbing their feelings, distancing themselves from their emotions and for them using a wheel of emotions can be an interesting and usefull experience. Emotional wheels are triggering us to allow the emotional experience to present itself. In this sense it is usefull to see that maybe we are allowing some emotions and blocking others.

What they lack, in my opinion, is scaling. The modern view on emotions is that emotions can be represented on an emotional scale and such emotional scales usually give an opportunity to not only understand the emotion, but to convert it. To go from negative to positive. An emotional wheel doesn’t really visually represent how we go up from sadness to joy and wellbeing. The feel wheel isn’t helping when we want to visually understand how the different emotions relate to each other and how they follow each other.

Check this out : The Hawkins Scale of Conscious Growth

The Take Away

Emotions and feelings are complex and complicated. Emotional awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence so it makes sense to stop and listen to our feelings and emotions. When we develop the ability to express, integrate, calibrate and manage our emotions we benefit in countless ways. But before we become able to manage our emotions we have to identify what is the emotion that we want to manage.

Identifying and naming our emotional experience is not as easy as it sounds, because most emotions are complex, mixed experiences. The ability to put a name to what we are actually feeling can give us relief, a greater sense of control and help us develop meaningful solutions, plans for moving forward and coping with emotionally difficult complex situations.

Emotion wheels, these colorful round graphs, are useful tools to help you connect with your emotional triggers and indicators. Emotion wheels can be used to release the emotional energies instead of suppressing them and thus open the gates of our emotional and personal development.

Sources, credits and references : How to use emotion wheel to get to know yourself-by Allaya Cook-Campbell; Emotional Word Wheel;