Feelings Thermometer: Rate How Intense a Feeling Is and Match Your Coping Skills

About this tool

A feelings thermometer is a visual scale for describing how strong an emotion feels and matching that intensity with a coping plan. It helps you put an inner experience into words you can use alone or share with someone supportive. Your rating is personal: the same feeling can look different in different people. Anger can feel intense even when you stay quiet, so describe body sensations and urges as well as visible behavior.

It is widely used with children and in anger management, anxiety work, and trauma recovery because it makes an abstract inner state concrete. Once you can put a number on a feeling, you can attach a plan to each level: what a 2 or 3 looks like and what gentle skill helps, all the way up to what a 9 or 10 looks like and what you need then. Many people find their warning signs become obvious once they are written down.

The practical aim is to catch changes in a feeling and identify a response you can actually use. Try linking an early cue, such as a tightening jaw, with a clear action, such as asking for a pause. Filling this in while calm, then keeping it handy, gives you a plan to consult when a feeling starts to rise. Sometimes emotions rise suddenly; needing help in that moment does not mean you used the worksheet incorrectly.

The idea traces back to the Subjective Units of Distress Scale, a 0 to 10 (or 0 to 100) rating that psychologist Joseph Wolpe built into behavior therapy in the 1960s so that a client and therapist could track distress in a session using a shared number instead of vague words. Clinicians later adapted that same scale into the child-friendly thermometer shape used here, and it now appears throughout anger management, anxiety treatment, and trauma care for the same reason Wolpe used it: a number is faster to report and easier to track over time than a description.

Used once, the thermometer is a snapshot. Used repeatedly, it becomes a record. Look back over a few weeks of entries for the same feeling and notice whether your early warning signs show up earlier, whether the coping skills you picked at a 4 or 5 are the ones that actually get used, and whether your highest ratings are trending down. A single high number after a hard day is not a setback; a pattern of climbing fast with no plan at the middle levels is the thing worth adjusting.

This tool is for everyday emotional intensity, and its ratings are not clinical cutoffs or emergency assessments. If feelings keep disrupting sleep, school, work, or relationships, or the plans you write down stop helping, consider support from a licensed professional regardless of your rating. Psychology.com's therapist directory can help you look for that support. If a feeling brings thoughts of harming yourself or someone else, seek immediate help. In the United States, call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for crisis support.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs teaches a feelings thermometer as a way for families to communicate about emotional intensity. SAMHSA also includes an anger meter and records of warning cues in its anger management manual. These resources support the practical approach of noticing feelings and planning responses. They do not establish that this particular worksheet prevents outbursts or provides a diagnosis, and a rating should never be used to decide whether someone deserves support.

With a child, start by describing your own experience in ordinary language, then invite the child to describe theirs. Accept their answer without debating whether they look upset enough. You might ask, "What does that feel like in your body?" or "Would quiet company or some space help?" Keep limits on unsafe behavior clear while allowing the feeling itself. The worksheet should support a conversation, rather than become a behavior grade.

If finding the emotion word is difficult, use the Identifying Emotions Worksheet or Feelings Chart first. Grounding Techniques offers concrete actions to consider for your plan, and the Coping Skills Library collects other options. The Emotional Dysregulation Test is a separate self-assessment, not a diagnosis or a substitute for discussing persistent difficulties with a professional.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the intensity scale and coping-by-level structure for clinical usefulness.

References

1. Gross JJ. Emotion regulation: current status and future prospects. Psychol Inq. 2015;26(1):1-26.
2. Kazdin AE. The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child. Houghton Mifflin; 2008.
3. Wolpe J. The Practice of Behavior Therapy. Pergamon Press; 1969.
4. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Veteran Parenting: Feelings, Understanding Emotions. https://www.veterantraining.va.gov/apps/veteranparenting/feelings-understanding.html
5. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Anger Management for Substance Use Disorder and Mental Health Clients: A Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Manual. https://library.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/anger_management_manual_508_compliant.pdf

Feelings Thermometer FAQ