Loading...

Please rotate your device.

This immersive experience is designed to be viewed in landscape mode.

Swipe to advance

You pressed the pause button. You can stay here as long as you’d like. Press the play button to return to your feelings journey.

How are you doing?

All-text version

A journey of emotional awareness, where we uncover the power of naming and visualizing your feelings.

By Abby VanMuijen with Michelle Pera-McGhee

Hi there, and welcome! My name is Abby. I’m an artist and have been learning a lot about how to express my feelings over the past few years. I made some art and some tools that helped me and wanted to share them with you.

On this journey, you’ll interact with those tools and practice articulating your own emotions. Please take good care of yourself.

If you’re not up for that, that’s okay too– feel free to come back another time. You can press the pause button in the top right to take a break at any point.

Hi, how are you doing? Options: ok, good, not great, or busy.

Until recently, I would always answer the question “how are you doing?” with one of those options I just listed– “okay,” “good,” “not so good,” or my favorite…“busy.”

But then that started to change.

I started to experience panic attacks, depression and anxiety, and engaged in non-suicidal self harm.

So I got my butt into therapy (where they don't let you off the hook with answers like this...).

My therapist suggested I use a feelings wheel to help improve my "emotional vocabulary."

I could choose words from the wheel to get more specific about how I was feeling.

Can you think any other words for the simple word you chose earlier?

Who knew– you can feel more than one feeling at once.

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett calls this “emotional granularity.” The more specific we can get, the more easily we can identify what our body is telling us it needs. Pretty cool, eh?

Enjoying these activities? Click here to open them in a new tab.

I also thought it was interesting that the wheel was organized by color and category. Although I didn't quite like the colors and categories on the wheels I found...

Colors can have very strong emotional associations - but they're different for everyone.

I started to do this every day. I'd write the words I was feeling and the color I associated with that feeling.

I found a lot of my associations lined up with the colors & character designs from the Pixar movie "Inside Out" - so I studied their process.

It turns out, most scientists agree, there are at least 5 core emotions that track back to the way our bodies intuitively communicate our needs to our caregivers before we have language.

Isn’t that FASCINATING?

So I added a new element to my practice - tracking how feelings show up in my body and facial expressions. I would draw an outline of my body and then color and make notes about where I felt each feeling.

When I feel frustrated, it looks like this:

Take a moment here to pause and notice your body. Start at the top-most part of your body and scan down through your center, out to your edges.

I started to notice some patterns in how the colors I was using lined up with how and where the feelings showed up in my body.

From there I could track that to some patterns of what my body was trying to ask for.

Every body is different, and they are the source of SO much information. It can be overwhelming to know what to do with it all.

I started to practice connecting my feelings to my needs by asking myself, “What does my body need in this moment?”

What does your body need right now?

I ended up turning all of this into my own emotion wheel.

I use the words, the colors, the body diagram and the needs chart to better understand and express how I'm doing each day and what I may be needing to experience more joy (satisfied needs) in my life.

I no longer answer the question “how are you doing?” the same way.

And I hold other people’s answers with more tenderness.

In difficult moments, I have some more tools to pause… and ask myself “what word is this? What color is it? Where do I notice it? What is my body telling me it needs?”

I try to do this most days in my sketchbook. These are some of my drawings.

I hope you enjoyed this journey and these tools– and that they inspire you to build your own practice of collecting “emotional data” in whatever way works best for you.

Thanks for making it all the way to the end. You’re welcome to come back to this page or the activities page any time you’d like.

If you’re interested in digging deeper, ahead is a list of resources that inspired and informed this project.

Like this story? Consider directly supporting the author.

Abby’s Work

Words Section

“Emotional Granularity” – Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD

Inside Out

“Inside Out” the movie– created by Disney Pixar
Dr. Paul Eckman’s work on emotions, micro-emotions and facial expressions
Dacher Keltner, PhD’s work on the social function of emotions
For more about the character development process– type “Inside Out Character Design Process” or “Inside Out Emotion Research Specialists” into your favorite search engine and enjoy the rabbit hole