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Wellness Wheel: Emotional Wellness

Resilience and Emotional Intelligence

SELF CAREWELLNESS WHEEL

6/23/20265 min read

Wellness Wheel: Emotional Wellness

Resilience and Emotional Intelligence

Dr. Peggy Swarbrick’s Eight Dimensions of Wellness paradigm addresses whole-being wellness.

Creating an understanding of wellness based on human psychology helps us move away from fad-like self care strategies and move towards creating long term habits based on our core needs.

The previous blogs cover seven of the eight Wellness Dimensions, and in this blog we focus on the final dimension: Emotional Wellness.

The Emotional dimension of the Wellness Wheel focuses on understanding, accepting, and managing feelings, stress, and behaviours. Thus aiming to maintain a positive mindset and healthy relationships. It involves cultivating self-care, self-esteem, resilience, and knowing when to ask for help with life's challenges.

The ability to cope effectively with life and to be able to create satisfying relationships is very powerful to our overall physical and mental health. By being able to understand and express our thoughts and feelings, we can create and maintain stronger social connectivity.

According to research, those who use emotional regulation strategies such as mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal are less likely to develop anxiety and depression.

Emotional resilience affects physical health by decreasing stress-related inflammation.

Emotional Regulation:

Do we have reasonable emotional regulation? :

Are we reacting in a way that is actually appropriate to what is occurring?
Are we able to regulate how we think and feel?
Does our reaction change if we’re with co-workers vs when we’re with family?

Learning coping skills that promote resiliency and control, eg. using humour or other skills to appropriately understand and react to a situation, is a very valuable thing to learn. And it leads to positive feelings of self-esteem, ability and worth. Spreading wellness throughout the rest of the wheel, and creating a feeling of overall balance in our lives.

The Emotions Wheel by Robert Plutchik for Enhancing Emotional Literacy

Emotions can be complex, scary and overwhelming.

Making sense of them, navigating them more effectively, and stepping away from being overwhelmed by them requires emotional literacy.

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, is a valuable resource to make sense of feelings and grow your emotional literacy, one of the foundations of practicing emotional intelligence (EQ).

An emotion wheel is a visual tool that maps human emotions, starting from core feelings (like happy, sad, angry) and branching out to more specific, nuanced variations (eg. happy to joyful, content, excited).

It helps us identify, understand, and articulate complex feelings, improving self-awareness, and communication by showing how emotions can relate to each other and intensify if not dealt with.

The goal of a feelings wheel is to help create a lexicon to describe feelings, as a stepping stone to understanding the cause of the feelings, and progressing to responding appropriately.

Core Emotions: The center of an Emotions Wheel typically features 8 basic emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, acceptance, surprise, and anticipation. These eight primary emotions are grouped into polar opposites, based on the physiological reaction each emotion creates in animals:

Joy is the opposite of Sadness.
Physiology: Connect vs withdraw
Fear is the opposite of Anger.
Physiology: Get small and hide vs get big and loud
Anticipation is the opposite of Surprise.
Physiology: Examine closely vs jump back
Disgust is the opposite of Trust.
Physiology: Reject vs embrace

Benefits of using an emotion wheel

The ability to identify one’s emotions is a foundational emotional intelligence skill. People with strong emotional literacy can describe emotional experiences in greater detail, and research has linked this with greater emotion regulation. Naming, or labeling your feelings is a powerful practice to regulate and navigate emotions. Plutchik’s Emotion Wheel is a great starting point for improving your ability to identify your emotions and practice emotional intelligence.

If left unchecked, emotions can intensify and become a way of being.
Self-Awareness: Helps you recognize what you're truly feeling beyond basic labels.
Emotional Regulation: Gives you the language to manage intense emotions by understanding their root.
Communication: Provides a shared vocabulary to discuss feelings with therapists, friends, or family.
Empathy: Builds understanding of others' emotional experiences.

Reflection practice

Start in the middle: Identify a core emotion that comes up often for you.
Work outward: Find the more specific feeling on the next ring (eg. from Sadness to Lonely or Depressed). How intensely is this emotion showing up for you? Is the feeling moving away from the core emotion or deeper into it?
Reflect: Consider triggers, intensity, and how different emotions connect. What kinds of events cause you to feel this way? Is it related to a story you keep telling yourself ?
Communicate: Use the words to describe your state to others, encouraging discussion, compromise, deepening understanding and empathy, journal your discoveries.

RAIN method for ‘Sitting with’ Difficult/Challenging Emotions

Recognise — name the emotion ‘sadness’, ‘frustration’, ‘anxiety’, etc.

Remember that naming or labeling your feelings is a powerful practice to regulate and navigate emotions by switching from your ‘feeling brain’ limbic system to your ‘thinking brain’ prefrontal cortex. (Name it to Tame it coined by Dan Siegal).

Allow — let the feeling ‘be’ without pushing it away.

Allow it to exist as an experience of this present moment. Give yourself permission to feel what you’re feeling. Using Kristen Neff’s ‘common humanity’ practice of realising that all humans have feelings; you are not alone or different or weird for feeling the way you are feeling.

Investigate — explore where it appears in the body.

Your head? Throat? Stomach/Gut?

Is it tight? Warm? Heavy? Moving?

Practice ‘feeling’ your feelings by checking where in your body you are noticing signs of this emotion.

What kind of other related emotions is it bringing up in you?

Nurture — offer kindness and compassion to yourself:

‘It’s okay.’ ‘I’m here.’ ‘This feeling is allowed.’ Often when big challenging emotions come up, they are trying to tell us something. Offering ourselves some nurturing helps to soothe our nervous system and reassure us that we can cope with whatever is coming up.

Let self-compassion soften the experience.

If you are willing and able to go deeper, add a Loving-Kindness (metta) meditation to be able to extend your compassion to the person who brings up these challenging feelings within you. The aim is to decrease the harmful physical effects of your feelings, not to make the other person’s actions ‘okay’. The benefit of a metta meditation lies in softening (detaching) your response, not in ignoring or normalising dangerous, toxic relationships.

Key Components of Emotional Wellness

Self-Awareness: Recognizing and accepting feelings (both positive and negative) rather than suppressing them.
Stress Management: Developing healthy coping mechanisms to handle life’s challenges, such as meditation, mindfulness, and regular physical activity.
Self-Care: Engaging in activities that support mental health, including getting enough sleep and maintaining a positive attitude.
Relationships: Cultivating healthy, supportive relationships and fostering empathy toward others.
Resilience: Building the ability to recover from setbacks and managing stress effectively.

Actionable Steps to Enhancing Emotional Wellness

Practice Gratitude: Acknowledge things you are thankful for daily to increase happiness. Keep a gratitude journal to foster positivity - whether on your phone, in a beautiful gratitude journal, or out loud to the people around you. Use an app or find a youtube clip that helps you plug in to a feeling of gratitude or appreciation.
Develop Coping Strategies: Learn techniques to handle stress, such as breathing exercises, labelling your emotions, or setting boundaries. Use these tools and practices regularly so that during emotionally difficult moments you have a good foundation to lean on.
Seek Support: Reach out to friends, family, or professionals when needed. Do not wait until you are drowning and burnt out. Use a wellness tracker or a body scan practice to regularly check in with yourself, monitor your emotional and physical state, so you can pick up changes sooner instead of letting them snowball.
Self-Reflection: Read books, listen to podcasts, attend classes, journal or identify areas you would like to work on, so you can keep growing and expanding your EQ.

A balanced wheel suggests that nurturing emotional wellness strengthens other areas of life,

Connection to Other Dimensions

Emotional Wellness affects most dimensions, most notably:

Physical (Sleep/Diet): Affects mood and cognitive functioning.
Social (Connection): Provides support systems that reduce stress.
Occupational (Balance): Affects stress levels and self-esteem.

To learn more about the Wellness Wheel and its practical applications, SAMHSA produces a Step-By-Step Guide to Wellness called Creating a Healthier Life. This guide has helpful resources to help you break down the dimensions of wellness and apply them to your lifestyle. You can use this workbook to more deeply understand the dimensions, to set goals, and develop an action plan for creating lifestyle habits that will strengthen your eight Dimensions of Wellness.

Ready to create Emotional Regulation?

Join our IRL EQ course in term 3 of 2026 or explore our structured programs designed to help you regulate your nervous system and support your gut.

The Nervous System Reset

Deep Self Care and Balance

Burnout Recovery

The Gut-Brain Axis

Parent Calm

Addressing Teen Anxiety

Claim your FREE Nervous System Regulation PDF explaining how your nervous system functions including regulation strategies.

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Wellness Wheel: Emotional Wellness

Wellness Wheel: Emotional Wellness

Resilience and Emotional Intelligence

Dr. Peggy Swarbrick’s Eight Dimensions of Wellness paradigm addresses whole-being wellness.

Creating an understanding of wellness based on human psychology helps us move away from fad-like self care strategies and move towards creating long term habits based on our core needs.

The previous blogs cover seven of the eight Wellness Dimensions, and in this blog we focus on the final dimension: Emotional Wellness.

The ability to cope effectively with life and to be able to create satisfying relationships is very powerful to our overall physical and mental health. By being able to understand and express our thoughts and feelings, we can create and maintain stronger social connectivity.

According to research, those who use emotional regulation strategies such as mindfulness and cognitive reappraisal are less likely to develop anxiety and depression.

Emotional resilience affects physical health by decreasing stress-related inflammation.

Emotional Regulation:

Do we have reasonable emotional regulation? :

Are we reacting in a way that is actually appropriate to what is occurring?

Are we able to regulate how we think and feel?

Does our reaction change if we’re with co-workers vs when we’re with family?

The Emotions Wheel by Robert Plutchik for Enhancing Emotional Literacy

Emotions can be complex, scary and overwhelming.

Making sense of them, navigating them more effectively, and stepping away from being overwhelmed by them requires emotional literacy.

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, is a valuable resource to make sense of feelings and grow your emotional literacy, one of the foundations of practicing emotional intelligence (EQ).

An emotion wheel is a visual tool that maps human emotions, starting from core feelings (like happy, sad, angry) and branching out to more specific, nuanced variations (eg. happy to joyful, content, excited).

It helps us identify, understand, and articulate complex feelings, improving self-awareness, and communication by showing how emotions can relate to each other and intensify if not dealt with.

The goal of a feelings wheel is to help create a lexicon to describe feelings, as a stepping stone to understanding the cause of the feelings, and progressing to responding appropriately.

Core Emotions: The center of an Emotions Wheel typically features 8 basic emotions: joy, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, acceptance, surprise, and anticipation. These eight primary emotions are grouped into polar opposites, based on the physiological reaction each emotion creates in animals:

Joy is the opposite of Sadness. Physiology: Connect vs withdraw

Fear is the opposite of Anger. Physiology: Get small and hide vs get big and loud

Anticipation is the opposite of Surprise. Physiology: Examine closely vs jump back

Disgust is the opposite of Trust. Physiology: Reject vs embrace

Benefits of using an emotion wheel

If left unchecked, emotions can intensify and become a way of being.

Self-Awareness: Helps you recognize what you're truly feeling beyond basic labels.

Emotional Regulation: Gives you the language to manage intense emotions by understanding their root.

Communication: Provides a shared vocabulary to discuss feelings with therapists, friends, or family.

Empathy: Builds understanding of others' emotional experiences.

Reflection practice

Start in the middle: Identify a core emotion that comes up often for you.

Work outward: Find the more specific feeling on the next ring (eg. from Sadness to Lonely or Depressed). How intensely is this emotion showing up for you? Is the feeling moving away from the core emotion or deeper into it?

Reflect: Consider triggers, intensity, and how different emotions connect. What kinds of events cause you to feel this way? Is it related to a story you keep telling yourself ?

Communicate: Use the words to describe your state to others, encouraging discussion, compromise, deepening understanding and empathy, journal your discoveries.

RAIN method for ‘Sitting with’ Difficult/Challenging Emotions

Recognise — name the emotion ‘sadness’, ‘frustration’, ‘anxiety’, etc.

Remember that naming or labeling your feelings is a powerful practice to regulate and navigate emotions by switching from your ‘feeling brain’ limbic system to your ‘thinking brain’ prefrontal cortex. (Name it to Tame it coined by Dan Siegal).

Allow — let the feeling ‘be’ without pushing it away.

Allow it to exist as an experience of this present moment. Give yourself permission to feel what you’re feeling. Using Kristen Neff’s ‘common humanity’ practice of realising that all humans have feelings; you are not alone or different or weird for feeling the way you are feeling.

Investigate — explore where it appears in the body.

Your head? Throat? Stomach/Gut?

Is it tight? Warm? Heavy? Moving?

Practice ‘feeling’ your feelings by checking where in your body you are noticing signs of this emotion.

What kind of other related emotions is it bringing up in you?

Nurture — offer kindness and compassion to yourself:

‘It’s okay.’ ‘I’m here.’ ‘This feeling is allowed.’ Often when big challenging emotions come up, they are trying to tell us something. Offering ourselves some nurturing helps to soothe our nervous system and reassure us that we can cope with whatever is coming up.

Let self-compassion soften the experience.

Key Components of Emotional Wellness

Self-Awareness: Recognizing and accepting feelings (both positive and negative) rather than suppressing them.

Stress Management: Developing healthy coping mechanisms to handle life’s challenges, such as meditation, mindfulness, and regular physical activity.

Self-Care: Engaging in activities that support mental health, including getting enough sleep and maintaining a positive attitude.

Relationships: Cultivating healthy, supportive relationships and fostering empathy toward others.

Resilience: Building the ability to recover from setbacks and managing stress effectively.

Actionable Steps to Enhancing Emotional Wellness

Develop Coping Strategies: Learn techniques to handle stress, such as breathing exercises, labelling your emotions, or setting boundaries. Use these tools and practices regularly so that during emotionally difficult moments you have a good foundation to lean on.

Self-Reflection: Read books, listen to podcasts, attend classes, journal or identify areas you would like to work on, so you can keep growing and expanding your EQ.

A balanced wheel suggests that nurturing emotional wellness strengthens other areas of life,

Connection to Other Dimensions

Emotional Wellness affects most dimensions, most notably:

Physical (Sleep/Diet): Affects mood and cognitive functioning.

Social (Connection): Provides support systems that reduce stress.

Occupational (Balance): Affects stress levels and self-esteem.

Join our IRL EQ course in term 3 of 2026 or explore our structured programs designed to help you regulate your nervous system and support your gut.

Connect

with us

Joy is the opposite of Sadness.
Physiology: Connect vs withdraw

Fear is the opposite of Anger.
Physiology: Get small and hide vs get big and loud

Anticipation is the opposite of Surprise.
Physiology: Examine closely vs jump back

Disgust is the opposite of Trust.
Physiology: Reject vs embrace