8 Feelings Wheels To Help You Navigate Your Emotions

Lately, I’ve been trying to find easy ways to incorporate wellness and mental health into my home. One of my favorite discoveries has been a feelings wheel pillow from Etsy.

“A feelings wheel is a color-coded wheel that focuses on primary emotions (such as sad, mad, happy, worried) and extends them out to secondary emotions,” Yara Mawad, a marriage and family therapist at Los Angeles’s Jenna Laski and Associates, told HuffPost over email. Also known as emotion wheel, the wheel “helps individuals expand their emotional vocabulary to be able to articulate and communicate how they are feeling with accuracy,” wrote Mawad. The five-pronged feelings wheel was developed by psychologist Gloria Wilcox in 1982, though other popular variations exist, including Robert Plutchik’s octagonal model.

You may be more familiar with this concept than you realize. Therapist David Ibrahim, who runs Glendale Counseling Services, a trauma and addiction clinic in Los Angeles, likened it to the Disney-Pixar movie Inside Out. In the movie, a child is assisted by her “Emotion Team” of Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness to help her cope with her family’s move. “Many people are not the adult version of themselves when they are in any type of relationship,” explained Ibrahim over email. “They are like the animated movie Inside Out, being operated by little kid parts of themselves.”

That’s where an emotion wheel comes in to help. “If you’re having feelings and are lost[,] then they can direct you to have clarity and understanding in yourself,” wrote Ibrahim. In other words, keeping a feelings wheel in your space or on your person can help you bolster your awareness of your own emotions and give you vocabulary for describing your inner world. It can also help improve your communication, especially if you are working on being less passive or less aggressive, according to Mawad.

This makes emotion wheels an especially helpful tool for couples trying to have a difficult conversation and for folks who have dealt with trauma, addiction or other mental health issues. Keeping a feelings wheel around can also help children learn to pinpoint their feelings. You needn’t be shy about incorporating a feelings wheel into your life at any age: “It’s important to begin somewhere,” Ibrahim wrote. “Without our emotions, we don’t know what we need.”

In true shopping writer fashion, I scoured the internet for the best feelings wheel pillow when I decided I wanted one. I chose this option from Etsy because it was so detailed, featuring primary, secondary and tertiary emotions. Its impressive detail makes it look sharp as decor as well as a practical piece I can actually use. Sure enough, it’s garnered me many compliments, with many of my friends making use of the pillow themselves whenever they stop by.

The pillow is also delightfully comfy — my cat often steals it for her afternoon naps — and features a smart graphic on its back that makes it look like a true throw pillow. Plus, it comes with its own pillow insert, so I didn’t have to do the guesswork of finding an insert for it on my own. It’s also machine washable and has a hidden zipper so the pillow stays fluffy without its insert constantly falling out.

This has quickly become one of my favorite pieces of decor in my home while serving as a reminder to check inward on myself and my feelings. Over time, the pillow has given me more language to specifically describe how I’m feeling — which has helped me better understand myself, my habits and decisions and be kinder to myself.

For me, this Etsy feelings pillow has been worthy every penny I spent on it. Luckily, there are tons of other feeling wheel accessories and decor available, too. Check out some of our favorites from Etsy and Amazon.

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