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

About this tool

A feelings thermometer is a simple scale, usually 0 to 10, that turns the size of an emotion into a number you can see and talk about. The point is not just to label what you feel, but how much you feel it. The difference between a 3 and an 8 of anger is the difference between a quiet word and a slammed door, and noticing that early is what makes it possible to act before things escalate.

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 real value is in catching the climb. Distress is far easier to manage at a 4 than at a 9, so the thermometer trains you to notice the early rungs and step in. Filling this in while calm, then keeping it handy, means you have a ready-made plan for the moment a feeling starts to rise.

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, not for emergencies. If ratings stay at 8 or higher for days at a time, if the plans you write down stop working, or if a feeling brings thoughts of harming yourself or someone else, that is a signal to bring in more support than a worksheet can give. Psychology.com's therapist directory lets you search for a licensed professional by specialty, at no cost, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available anytime by call or text.

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.

Feelings Thermometer FAQ