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The Feelings Map

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The Feelings Map

What am I feeling, and where?

Find the word for what you feel, learn what it’s telling you, and notice where it shows up in your body.

Written by , psychologist and psychotherapist

Someone asks how you’re feeling, and nothing comes. It isn’t fine, exactly. It’s more off, or bad, or just a lot (very scientific terms, I know). I hear this from clients all the time. Hardly anyone is taught to name feelings, so most of us get by on a handful of words for something that comes in dozens of shades.

You don’t have to know what you feel to start. Pick the closest of nine core feelings, or start from where it sits in your body, and narrow it down from there. It takes a minute or two. Once a feeling has a name, it’s usually a little easier to handle, and easier to explain to someone else.

THE FOUR STEPS

PART 1How does it feel right now?1 min
PART 2Learn more about a feeling2 sections · 2 min
PART 3Easily confused1 min
PART 4Where do you feel it?2 min
→Can’t name anything yet? Start from your body

Part one of four

How does it feel right now?

Start with the wheel: tap the core feeling in the middle that’s closest, and it will open up to show all its words. If nothing jumps out, pick the energy that fits best first, and the wheel will dim what doesn’t fit. There’s no wrong answer, and you can change it. If more than one feeling is there, that’s normal. Start with whichever stands out.

Stuck? See every feeling
Nine core feelings sit in the middle of this feelings wheel. Going clockwise from the top they are afraid, angry, ashamed, sad, drained, calm, connected, happy and curious. Each one gathers the words people tend to group with it. On a bigger screen, a few of the words also sit around the edge, from quieter to stronger. Each family is sorted into smaller groups. Each family has its own color, and where we could, it’s a color people around the world often link with that feeling, such as red for anger and pink for love. Lighter words are quieter, and deeper ones are stronger. Energy is how switched on your body feels, from sluggish to wired. Pleasantness is how good or bad it is to be in this feeling. It isn’t a rule about how you should feel.

Part two of four

Learn more about a feeling

Know the word already? Pick it here, and its card opens below. The dot shows its family on the wheel.

Or start from a family

Tap a core feeling on the wheel to open it up, then tap a word. Its card will show up here.

Two feelings at once

Feelings don’t always take turns. You can be relieved and sad when something ends, proud and lonely when someone you love leaves home, or love someone and be angry with them in the same breath. That doesn’t mean you’re mixed up, or that one of them isn’t real. Both are real, and each one is telling you something. If two words fit, keep both.

Prefer paper? The Feelings Map also comes as a printable PDF, with the wheel on the first page and all 66 feelings and what they mean on the next two. For children, there is also a simpler version to print: a simpler wheel, six feeling cards, a body to color in, a daily check-in and a page for grown-ups.

Download the printable PDFDownload the kids’ version

Part three of four

Easily confused

Some feelings sit so close together that they’re easy to mix up, yet they ask for different things. Pick a pair, then try the question that tells them apart.

Pair 1 of 12

Part four of four

Where do you feel it?

Feelings often show up in the body before we have a word for them. Tap every part of your body where you notice something. If you’ve already chosen a word, the places people commonly notice it are marked in gold.

You can leave more than one mark.

Feelings often noticed there

Tap the figure where you notice something to see which feelings people commonly report there.Choose one or more areas to see which feelings people commonly report there.

What the body-map studies did and did not show

What they did. In the first study, in 2014, about 700 people looked at emotion words, short stories, film clips or faces, and painted on an outline of a body where they felt activity go up or down. Most spoke Finnish, with smaller groups who spoke Swedish and Taiwanese Hokkien.

Averaged across people, the maps for different emotions looked different: more in the chest and head for many emotions, more in the arms and hands for anger and happiness, less in the arms and legs for sadness, more around the throat and stomach for disgust, and happiness lit up nearly the whole body. Later work with almost 4,000 people from 101 countries, using emotion words, found maps that agreed closely across countries and between women and men. A study of children found the maps get more specific as they grow up.

What they didn’t. They’re averages of many people, not a reading of you, and in the first study most people were young adults and most were women. Your body can differ, and so can your culture, your history and the day you’ve had. They’re also what people said they felt, or expected to feel, not measurements of heart rate or muscle tension, and the authors say they can’t fully rule out that shared ideas about emotions shape the maps. There’s a lot of overlap too. When a computer was trained on the maps and asked to pick out six basic emotions and a neutral state, it was right about 4 times in 10, against about 1 in 7 by chance.

Most of the feelings on this page weren’t in the studies at all. For those, the body notes are common plain-language descriptions, and the page labels them that way.

Use it as a way in, not a verdict. The same sensation can come from things that aren’t feelings, like caffeine, illness, medicines or poor sleep. If a sensation is strong, new or worrying, get it checked.

USING IT WITH SOMEONE ELSE

The map works for two, too

Feelings are often easier to name with someone beside you.

With a partner. After a hard day, or before a conversation you’ve been putting off, each of you picks a word on your own, then you compare. It often turns up something neither of you expected, like irritation that’s really tiredness (or hunger, which happens more than anyone admits), or anger that’s really hurt. Starting from one word each is gentler than starting from the argument.

With a child. Children learn feeling words the way they learn any words, by hearing them used. Name your own feelings out loud now and then, like “I’m feeling a bit frustrated, so I’m taking a breath,” and let them point to a color on the wheel when they don’t have the word yet. You can then offer a word for it, like “Are you feeling sad?”, and let them tell you whether it fits. The nine core feelings in the middle are the easiest place to start.

With your therapist. You can do this with your therapist, too (I looove it!!). If a feeling came up during the week, find its word on the map and bring it to your next session, or look for it together when something is hard to put into words.

WHY BOTHER WITH AN EXACT WORD?

A better word tends to take some of the heat out

Putting a feeling into words has been shown, in brain-scan and lab studies, to ease distress and to calm the brain’s alarm response. People who can tell their feelings apart more finely also tend to cope better when things get hard. These are associations and modest effects, so treat a good word as a helpful tool, not a fix. Naming isn’t always the best first step, either. In one set of lab studies, people who named a feeling first found it a little harder to then see the situation differently, so if a feeling is huge, it’s fine to calm down first and come back to the word later.

Our article Name It to Tame It goes through the research and how to use it.

WHERE THIS MAP COMES FROM

Our own drawing, built on old ideas

The core feelings come from research in which people sorted emotion words into piles of words that feel alike. The same few families kept showing up, such as fear, anger, sadness, joy and love. We added three that the classic lists tend to miss or fold into others: a family for shame, guilt and embarrassment, which are their own kind of feeling, a family for drained, low-energy states, and a family for calm, which the classic lists fold into joy. The wheel draws on another long-standing idea in psychology: feelings can be described by how pleasant they are and how much energy they carry. It also sits behind tools such as the Mood Meter.

The colors come from a study of more than 4,500 people in 30 countries, who linked many of the same colors with the same feelings, such as red with anger, pink with love and yellow with joy. We made them lighter so every word is easy to read, and we chose our own colors for the feelings the study didn’t cover. Feeling wheels, like the one Gloria Willcox published in 1982, fan out from a few core feelings into finer words. Her wheel is the inspiration for ours, and we drew ours from scratch: the core feelings, words, groups and pictures are all our own.

Scientists still don’t agree on how many emotions there are: some count six basic ones, one large study found 27, and some think emotions don’t come in fixed types at all, so the words here are a starting set, not a complete list. As far as we know, no feelings wheel, ours included, has been tested as a tool yet, so we can’t say how much using one helps: the studies so far are about naming feelings and telling them apart, and the science on wheels themselves hasn’t caught up yet.

The wheel’s edges are soft on purpose. Research on how people describe emotions finds many distinct kinds that blend into each other smoothly, so neighbors on the wheel often overlap, and some words could sit in two families. Where each word sits, from unpleasant to pleasant and from low to high energy, is our own placement, guided by that research. This is a tool for noticing and naming. It isn’t therapy or a diagnosis.

IF A FEELING IS TOO HEAVY

You don’t have to sort it out alone

Some feelings are heavy enough that a map isn’t what you need. If you feel hopeless, or you’re having thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life, you deserve real support. If you might act on those thoughts, or you’re in danger right now, call your local emergency number.

You can find the crisis lines and emergency numbers for your country on our helplines page. Our article on suicidal thoughts explains what helps and how to talk about it.

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BOOKS FROM OUR SHELF

  1. Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Random House.
  2. Witek, J. (2014). In my heart: A book of feelings [Children’s book]. Abrams Appleseed.

Last reviewed October 2026

A therapist taking notes on a clipboard during a session

WORKING WITH THIS

When the same feelings keep coming back

Some feelings come back again and again, or arrive so tangled that no word fits. Therapy is a place to slow down with them, notice what you feel and where, and work out what each one is asking of you, at your own pace. If you’re already seeing one of us, bring what you noticed here to your next session.

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