How to use a feelings wheel
Read the wheel from the inside out. The center holds eight broad families, and the outer ring holds the specific words inside each one.
- Check your body first. A tight chest, a hot face or a heavy stomach gives you a clue before the words show up.
- Rule out families. You may not know what you feel, but you can often tell what you don't. Cross off the families that miss.
- Move one ring out. Read the words in the family that's left and pick the closest one. If two fit, keep both. Mixed feelings are normal, and Phorb lets you log two at once.
- Say it in one sentence. A word you only think about does less than a word you say out loud or write down.
Reach for the wheel when you catch yourself answering "fine" or "tired" for the third day in a row. Those words close a conversation. "Disappointed" or "lonely" gives your partner something to answer.
How to tell your partner what you feel
Keep it to one or two sentences:
I feel [the word] about [what happened]. What would help is [one need].
For example: "I feel worried about money this month. What would help is looking at the numbers together on Sunday." Then stop and let your partner answer. You can explain where the feeling came from later.
Swap blame words for feelings
Some words sound like feelings but describe what the other person did. "I feel ignored" means "you ignored me," and your partner will hear an accusation and defend themselves. Look for the feeling underneath:
- Ignored: try lonely or hurt.
- Disrespected: try hurt or angry.
- Criticized: try ashamed or hurt.
- Controlled: try frustrated or anxious.
- Abandoned: try scared or lonely.
"When you were on your phone during dinner, I felt lonely" asks for closeness. "I felt ignored" starts a debate about the phone.
When it gets heated
If you're too upset to pick a word, name the family and ask for a pause: "I'm angry and I need twenty minutes." Then come back and finish the conversation. If the word you keep landing on is contempt, take it seriously. The Gottman Institute calls contempt the single greatest predictor of divorce.
When your partner tells you a feeling
Say the word back before you add anything: "Lonely. Since when?" A shared feeling is what John Gottman calls a bid for connection. The Gottman Institute reports that newlyweds who were still married six years later had turned toward each other's bids 86% of the time, compared with 33% for couples who divorced. If you're not sure what your partner wants, ask whether they want comfort, help or someone to listen. Our daily check-in questions use the same follow-up.
Share the good feelings too
Plenty of people look at a feelings wheel and see a chart of bad moods. On this one, Happy, Trust and most of Anticipation are pleasant, and they deserve airtime. In four studies, Shelly Gable and colleagues found that telling someone about a good event lifted people's mood beyond the event itself, and couples whose partner usually reacted with enthusiasm reported more intimacy and daily satisfaction. "I feel proud of how I handled that call" counts as much as "I'm stressed."
Why naming a feeling helps
- In a UCLA brain-imaging study, people who put a label on the emotion in a negative image showed less amygdala activity than when they processed the image another way. The amygdala reacts to threat, so naming a feeling seems to take some heat out of it.
- People who tell their unpleasant feelings apart in detail are less likely to turn to binge drinking, aggression or self-harm under intense distress, according to a review by Todd Kashdan, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Patrick McKnight. Psychologists call this emotional granularity.
- In two diary studies of everyday conversations, people felt closer when they opened up and the other person opened up back, and feeling understood carried part of that effect. Sharing emotions predicted closeness more than sharing facts.
None of this means one word will fix a hard week. Finding the word and saying it to someone who listens is a good first step. If you find it hard to identify feelings at all, or a low mood stays for weeks, talk to a therapist or doctor.
Which feelings wheel is this?
Gloria Willcox published the original Feeling Wheel in 1982 in the Transactional Analysis Journal. It has three rings, with six broad feelings in the center (sad, mad, scared, joyful, powerful and peaceful), and it's the version many therapists hand out.
Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions arranges eight basic emotions as four pairs of opposites: joy and sadness, trust and disgust, fear and anger, surprise and anticipation.
The wheel on this page uses Plutchik's eight families with 37 everyday words in the outer ring. You pick from the same set in Phorb, so the word you find here is the word you can send. We kept two rings instead of three so every word stays readable on a phone.