Learning to label your emotions at a higher level of granularity is also shown to help you regulate and work with them more effectively. According to, there are around 34,000 human emotions.
Being able to identify emotions is a key building block of emotional intelligence. The more specific you can be, the better. An emotion wheel is a great visual aid to help us identify how we’re feeling, and also to expand our emotional vocabulary.
The Feelings Wheel is filled with different layers and dimensions of color and emotion. The intensity of the color increases with an increase in the intensity of the emotion. Rating your anger on a scale of 1-5 reduces your heart rate, a measure of distress.ĭescribing your emotions when dealing with a phobia increases your courage in facing it.Īdding 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 eight Primary emotions laid out by Robert Plutchik have been marked using a noticeable color in the Wheel of Emotions. Studies from UCLA and other institutions have found that putting your feelings into words makes them easier to cope with. 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.Įxtensive research has found that labeling your emotions is one of the best things you can do to improve your mental health. Give yourself a few moments to pause and sit with this feeling. 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, go out closer to the edges and see how specific you can get. Start at the center of the wheel and identify which of the emotion families you think that you are currently feeling.