Name it to tame it: using the Feeling Wheel
Putting a feeling into words can take some heat out of it. The wheel helps you find the word, from the outside in or the inside out.
Why a word helps
A feeling with no name can feel big and shapeless. Giving it a word changes that. In one well-known brain-imaging study, people looked at emotional pictures. When they named the feeling in the picture, a part of the brain that raises the alarm (the amygdala) was less active (Lieberman et al., 2007). Researchers call this "affect labelling", which just means putting feelings into words. It works quietly, even when you're not trying to calm down (Torre & Lieberman, 2018).
You're not fixing anything. You're just saying what's there.
The finer, the better
Some of us call every hard feeling "stressed" or "bad". Others can tell disappointed from resentful from lonely. How finely you can tell feelings apart is sometimes called "emotional granularity". People with more finely-tuned feeling words tend to cope better when life gets tough. They're also less likely to reach for unhelpful ways to escape a feeling (Kashdan, Barrett & McKnight, 2015). The good news is that it's a skill, and it grows with practice.
Two ways to use the wheel
The wheel in Check-in is our own feelings map, in the tradition of the feeling wheel Gloria Willcox introduced (Willcox, 1982). It puts nine core feelings in the centre. Each one opens out into a middle ring of broader feelings, then an outer ring of more specific words. You can pick a word at any of the three levels.
Outside in. Not sure what you feel? Scan the outer ring slowly. Notice which words tug at you or seem to "light up". Pick one or two, then follow them inward to see which core feeling they belong to.
Inside out. Already have a rough sense, like "I'm angry"? Start in the centre and move outward. Is it more frustrated, or more hurt? Keep going until a word feels about right.
"About right" is enough. You can choose more than one word. Mixed feelings are normal. Feeling proud and nervous at the same time is very human.
Go gently
If naming something stirs up more than you expected, pause. Look around the room. Feel your feet on the floor. Breathe out slowly. You can come back to it later.
Try it in the app
- Open the wheel and slowly scan the outer ring. Tap any word that tugs at you.
- Look at where your chosen words sit. Which core feeling do they share?
- Or start in the centre with the feeling you already sense, and work outward until a word fits.
- Check your selected feelings. Add a second word if one doesn't cover it.
If it gets too much: stop, ground yourself, and reach out. In Aotearoa New Zealand, call or text 1737 any time to talk with a trained counsellor. In an emergency, call 111.
Sources
- Lieberman et al. (2007), Putting feelings into words
- Torre & Lieberman (2018), Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation
- Kashdan, Barrett & McKnight (2015), Unpacking emotion differentiation
- Willcox (1982), The Feeling Wheel