Introducing the feelings wheel:

Hello you,

Today I have a freebie resource for you and I wanted to talk about self-regulation/emotional regulation. The tool helps with this!
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Mastering self-regulation (or emotional regulation) is to be able to acknowledge our emotions and be conscious about how these impact our behaviours. We don’t have to be calm and zen-like, but we have to understand what sets us off and know how to recover from it when something does.

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I help people in this area because when we are NOT regulated (dysregulated), that’s when we experience things like burnout, relationship breakdowns, difficulties focusing, angry outbursts that seem out of the blue or random crying episodes and generally feeling overwhelmed all of the time.

If this sounds like you at any point, then it’s probably definitely worth learning about emotional regulation.

Step 1 - Feeling the feels

It’s a big topic so I’m going to split it over a few emails, starting today with step 1 - Feeling the feels.

The first tool in self-regulation is awareness and noticing. The easiest thing to be aware of is the feelings and sensations in the body. So I ask you:

How do you feel (or how did you feel, if we’re doing this retrospectively)?

What range of emotions are going on? Often we struggle to know so I love (and personally use) this FEELINGS WHEEL (free download) to identify all the feels.

This tool is great (thank you to Dr. Gloria Willcox and Calm) because it’s such a clever way of understanding the complexity of our feelings. For example, are we just sad or is it hurt, loneliness, shame, guilt etc?

We are complex folk, us humans! Knowing this is a vital tool for learning how to change our behaviours, get ourselves out of bad headspaces and really utilise our full potential.

So, I’m not going to overwhelm you with what’s next, but I will set you a little mission, if you choose to accept it 😉

Before next week, try to use the feelings wheel at least 2, ideally 3 times and write down (in a journal or on your phone) what feelings you identify with. You can choose that given moment, OR you can reflect on a time when you felt particularly emotional. Maybe you wished you handled a situation better or you want to understand why you behaved in a certain way. You can pick that time and just list whatever emotions you felt when it was happening.

Don’t overthink it! This is just to get into the habit of checking in with ourselves. We’re not always “fine”, a lot is going on in our inner worlds and now we’re learning to tune into them and do some investigative work.

That’s your “homework”. Next week we’ll build on feelings by delving into our THOUGHTS.

See you then
-Nicola