Color Your Feelings (Emotion Color Wheel): Art-Based Therapy Activity

• A color key: feeling words in a column with an empty box beside each one
• A frame to color: an emotion color wheel (a large circle, split into slices or left open), a full page, or a seven-day strip with one box per day
• Crayons, colored pencils, markers or oil pastels in at least eight colors
• A word list for clients who need options, such as the List of Emotions

Plan on 15 to 30 minutes: steps 1 and 2 build the key, and steps 3 to 6 make and discuss the map.

1. 1
   Choose the feelings. Start with four to six for young children (for example happy, sad, mad, scared and calm) and six to ten for teens and adults. Invite the client to add words of their own.
2. 2
   Build the color key. The client picks one color per feeling and fills the box beside each word. There is no correct color. A study of 4,598 people in 30 countries found broad agreement about which colors go with which emotions, along with real differences tied to language and geography (Jonauskaite et al., 2020), so the client's own pairings are the ones that count.
3. 3
   Pick a frame and a time span. The wheel is the usual choice: one circle for today or this week. A full page or a seven-day strip works for clients who want more room or a day-by-day view.

   • Circle: how the client feels right now or today.
   • Full page or body outline: a longer stretch, such as the past month, a school year or a relationship.
   • Seven-day strip: one box per day, colored at the end of each day as homework.
4. 4
   Color the map. The amount of space each color takes shows how much of that feeling is there. Blending, layering and leaving white space are all fine.
5. 5
   Check the amounts together. Ask the client to rank the colors from most to least or to estimate a rough percentage for each.
6. 6
   Talk it through with the prompts below. Repeating the map later with the same key lets the client compare the two.

• During: Which color went down first? What made you start there?
• During: I notice you went back over that spot. What's happening as you color it?
• After: Which feeling takes up the most room? Would the people around you guess that?
• After: Is there a feeling on your key that never made it onto the map? What keeps it off?
• After: Where do two colors touch or blend? Do those feelings tend to show up together?
• After: What does the white space mean to you, if anything?
• After (weekly strip): Which day looks most different from the rest, and what happened that day?

• Kids: Use four or five feelings with a simple face beside each word, and keep the time span short, such as today or this week.
• Teens: Let them build the key from their own palette and accept slang feeling words. The weekly strip can live in a notes app between sessions.
• Adults: Split broad feelings into finer ones (irritated, resentful and furious in place of a single "mad") to build emotional vocabulary. A body outline version can show where each feeling sits; the Where Do I Feel It? tool pairs well with it.
• Groups: Members build their own keys, then compare the colors they chose for the same feeling, which opens a conversation about how people experience one emotion differently. Families can each map the same event.
• Color vision differences: Add a pattern to each box in the key (dots, stripes, cross-hatching) so the map still reads clearly.

• Trauma: Mapping a specific painful event can bring that event very close. Start with the present day or week before mapping anything in the past, and let the client set the time span.
• Flooding and grounding: If one color starts to take over and distress climbs, pause the coloring and say what you notice. Ask the client to press both feet into the floor, breathe out slowly, and name five things they can see, or use the grounding tool, before returning to the map or closing the session.
• When to stop: Stop if the client dissociates, reports urges to self-harm, or the map points to a safety concern. Move to a risk check and safety planning.
• No diagnostic interpretation: Read the colors through the client's key and nothing else. A large patch of one color, dark shades or blank space mean whatever the client says they mean, and they are never signs of a disorder on their own.

A 10-year-old referred for angry outbursts at school built a key with five feelings: red for mad, blue for sad, yellow for happy, purple for worried and green for calm. Asked to color a circle for the past week, he filled about half of it with purple and only a thin edge with red. The clinician asked about the big purple area, and he talked about worrying every morning that nobody would pick him up after his mom's work shifts changed. Together they noticed that his red moments usually came after a lot of purple. The session ended with a plan for him to tell his teacher "I'm purple" when the worry started, and his mother agreed to tell him the pickup plan at breakfast each day.