The Feelings Wheel: Why Understanding Your Feelings Supports Emotional Regulation
- Nat Harrison
- Dec 10, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 23
With our busy lives and the boom in technology and social media, we as humans have moved further away from connecting with ourselves and understanding our feelings.
In the past, many people I’ve coached have mentioned not having the language to articulate their feelings and being unable to understand and respond to them in ways that feel good. I most definitely struggled with this in my 20s, and it caused me a lot of problems, often leading to panic attacks because I just got so overwhelmed, not having a clue what I was feeling or what it was trying to tell me.
I want to reframe feelings in a way that helps us understand them so they can guide us, because we need to listen to our bodies and our intuition. The Feelings Wheel has helped me greatly with this.
Introducing The Feelings Wheel
“Alexithymia: is a cognitive-affective impairment that makes it difficult to identify, understand, and describe emotions. The term comes from Greek and roughly translates to "no words for emotion". - Read more here.
Many neurodivergent people and ADHDers have something called Alexithymia, which is an inability to attach a label to a feeling because they don’t have the language to articulate it.
It’s something that both I and some of my clients have all struggled with.
It makes it incredibly difficult to take care of yourself when you don’t know what needs tending in the first place. This is why connecting with ourselves and our feelings, giving them names, and understanding them are so important for regulation.
Something I discovered last year was the Feelings Wheel. This has been so helpful to me because feelings indicate met and unmet needs. If our needs are met, we’ll generally feel positive, regulated, and good about ourselves; if they’re not, we’ll be dysregulated, which can hurt us.
Not only that, but meeting our needs is one of the biggest ways we can build mental resilience, limit our chances of developing depression and make ourselves happy overall.
The only way to do this is to understand our feelings and what they’re trying to tell us. Understanding them helps us understand ourselves, making decisions that fulfil our needs and steer us towards what we want.
The Feelings Wheel App
Roman Paprotsky has a wonderful app that you can download here. I use it and would recommend it. You can get it just here. It’s been such a great tool for me. I use it by looking at the wheel and trying to identify as many feelings as possible. It’s completely possible to hold both positive and negative emotions simultaneously.
It’s also completely normal to have one overriding feeling that takes precedence over the rest, so once you’ve identified it, I recommend sitting with it and saying things like: Yes, I’m stressed, and yes, I’m overwhelmed, but I’m also really proud of myself for having that honest conversation yesterday. I’m feeling really loving towards my children today, or I’m feeling really ill and tired.
Acknowledge and name them, and look at them to see what you need. If you’re feeling unwell or tired, you may need some rest. If you’re feeling angry, try to figure out where that anger comes from so you can tackle anything that comes up. If you’re stressed, look at how often you’re giving yourself rest and time away from the things causing that stress.
In my journaling post, you can find ways to use the feelings wheel to help you as a part of your morning routine, but the step-by-step process I usually go through is this:
Use the wheel to identify all of my feelings
Sit with them to understand where those feelings come from
Work out what needs aren’t being met to cause any negative feelings
Work out what you need to do to meet those needs.
Once you do this, you can notice how that feeling changes.
The great thing about Roman’s Feelings Wheel app is that you can take notes and save your feelings every day to refer back to and see how they change over time.
You’ll also be able to see which ones come up often and gain a better understanding of recurring feelings that might need a little more TLC.
I honestly love this app, and it’s a great tool. Using it alongside EFT (Emotional Freedom Therapy) is also a great way to regulate and understand your feelings.
Look out for my future post on EFT, where I’ll explain how to work through overpowering feelings that make you upset. In the meantime, for more tips on regulating your emotions, check out my post, Emotional Regulation: What it is and how to do it.
Set yourself up for a successful day by becoming aware of your thoughts, feelings and daily goals each morning!
If you’d like to work with a professional career coach specialising in ADHD to help you overcome mental, emotional, or general roadblocks in your career, then book a free consultation with me.
I’ll see you next time.
Nat x
About Nat Harrison, Specialist ADHD Career Coach, Ayama
Hi, I am Nathalina (everyone calls me Nat). I help people become more fulfilled and happy in their working lives by aligning their careers or businesses with their skills, values, and interests, and by helping them overcome barriers to success at work.
I am a Certified Specialist ADHD coach, and I work with neurodivergent people who want to harness their brains for the better, improve their relationships with themselves and manage their symptoms.
Book a consultation below if you would benefit from some coaching on your ADHD and working life.
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