Thanks for taking a few minutes to test out a new tool I’m creating. It’s called the Personalized Emotions Map — a way of creating a unique-to-you tool that shows your emotional vocabulary.

Why do I need to know my emotional vocabulary?

In the research world, psychologists talk about “emotional granularity” or “differentiation of emotions.” Essentially, how well can you identify, label, and describe different emotions with some degree of precision—rather than using broad or overly vague terms like “fine, okay, or bad.”

The research is pretty clear:

• Specific labeling of negative emotions protects mental health. Studies show that being able to name a difference between negative emotions and feelings is strongly linked to lower levels of depression and overall mental well-being, especially during times of high stress.

• Emotional Granularity helps people regulate stress in real time. Naming specific emotions doesn’t eliminate difficult feelings, but it does act as a protective buffer against stress. It can lead to improved sleep, emotional regulation, and help prevent harmful coping mechanisms like binge eating, alcohol abuse, or catastrophizing.

• High Emotional Granularity improves treatment outcomes. People with higher emotional granularity get more benefit from talk therapy and are more likely to stick with medical and mental health recommendations and support when experiencing distress.

• Emotional granularity is a trainable skill: This is not a fixed trait—it can be actively built through mindfulness, expanding your emotional vocabulary, and regularly tracking daily emotions and feelings. Being able to articulate the difference between “regretful” and “hopeless” means you can take more specific actions to help you move through the emotion, rather than labelling every low-energy, unpleasant emotion as “sad.”

A lot of people are familiar with the Emotions Wheel.

It can be a helpful tool to see a wide range of emotional vocabulary words. I think it falls short in that it’s organized in a way that doesn’t actually help me quickly find a word or phrase that matches what I’m feeling—especially if I don’t already have a specific word I’m looking for.

The Mood Meter is a helpful improvement, orienting people to a more embodied experience—the axes are two spectrums, pleasant to unpleasant and high energy to low energy. You can use your embodied experience to navigate to the right area of the chart and find a cluster of words that might be pretty close to describing what you are feeling.

I wanted to create a customizable map or chart so that you could both identify the words that feel most authentic to your vocabulary and experience, while also giving you a sort of visual assessment of where you might have gaps in your emotional vocabulary—space to work on refining the words you use to describe particular types of emotions.

So, without further delay, below is a simple tool—version 1—that aims to accomplish these things. Once you’ve created your own map, take a few minutes to reflect:

• What about my map was expected? What is surprising?

• Where do I see any areas of strength (high volume of words) and gaps in my emotional vocabulary?

• Are there additional words that weren’t available that you might add? (The ability to add custom words is in the works for v.2 of the tool).

• What did you like about this tool? What advice would you give me for improving it in future versions?

After creating your Personalized Emotions Map, be sure to save it (download or take a screenshot). Next, hit the button below and let me know about your experience, thoughts, and advice to help improve this tool.