Self-Care Wheel: Audit Six Areas of Your Life and Plan What to Tend Next

About this tool

A self-care wheel is a short audit of how you are looking after yourself, divided into six areas: physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, personal and professional. You go through the six areas in turn, note what you already do in each and how well it is going, and look for the area that has gone quiet. The point is not to add six new routines. It is to see the whole picture at once, because most people who feel run down are over-serving one or two areas, usually work, and have let the others thin out without noticing.

The version most people have seen is Olga Phoenix's Self-Care Wheel from 2013, a colourful circle with dozens of example activities written into the six segments. Phoenix adapted it from the Self-Care Assessment Worksheet in Transforming the Pain, Karen Saakvitne and Laurie Anne Pearlman's 1996 workbook for people whose jobs expose them to other people's trauma: therapists, social workers, nurses, first responders, advocates. That lineage explains the six headings. They were written for helpers at risk of vicarious trauma and burnout, and the professional segment, which looks odd on a wellness poster, is there because the worksheet was designed for people whose work was the problem. The wheel has since spread far beyond that audience, which is fine, as long as you know where it came from.

Here is what each segment covers. Physical is the body: sleep, food, movement, the medical and dental appointments you keep putting off, time away from screens. Psychological is the mind: things that make you think, learning something, saying no, noticing your inner experience, getting help when you need it. Emotional is feeling: time with people you love, being allowed to cry, laugh or be angry, comforting yourself, praise you let land. Spiritual is meaning: whatever connects you to something larger than today's list, which for some people is religious practice and for others is nature, music, service, silence or awe. Personal is the you outside your roles: hobbies, friends who are not colleagues, your own goals, plain unstructured time. Professional is work as it affects you: breaks, boundaries, peer support, a manageable load, learning, and leaving on time.

The wheel is a reflective structure, not a validated measure. It has no scoring key, no norms and no cut-off, and the 0 to 10 ratings on this page are your own impressions, useful for comparing one segment with another and this month with last month, not for comparing yourself with anyone else. The research that supports it is indirect: the burnout literature summarised by Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter shows that exhaustion, cynicism and a sense of ineffectiveness grow when demands stay high and recovery stays low, and the compassion-fatigue literature that Charles Figley began shows the same pattern in helpers. A self-care wheel is one way to make recovery visible so you can protect it. It has not been tested as an intervention in its own right, and this page will not pretend it has.

Set aside twenty minutes. For each segment, write what you actually do, not what you intend to, and rate how well that area is being tended. Be specific: 'walk the dog most mornings' rather than 'exercise'. When all six are done, read the ratings together. Which area scored lowest? Which one has nothing written in it at all? Pick one area and one small change you could make in the next month, and write down what tends to get in the way. Then keep the record somewhere you will see it and come back in four to six weeks to re-rate. A second pass may show movement in the area you chose, or a slide in another; either is useful information, which is the wheel doing its job.

The wheel works well for people who are competent and busy and have stopped checking in with themselves: clinicians, carers, parents, managers, students in a heavy year. It suits people who find a blank journal page intimidating but can fill in a diagram. It is less useful when the problem is not neglect but illness. If you have been low for weeks, cannot sleep, or feel hopeless, a tidier self-care routine is not the treatment, and rating yourself poorly across all six segments can become one more stick to beat yourself with. In that situation the right next step is a conversation with a doctor or therapist, and the wheel can wait.

The common mistakes are predictable. People treat it as a checklist and try to fix all six at once, which lasts about a fortnight. They fill the segments with aspirations rather than facts and then feel they have failed a test nobody set. They confuse self-care with self-indulgence, so the physical segment fills up with treats rather than sleep. And they skip the professional segment because it feels like someone else's responsibility, when leaving work on time, protected breaks and regular supervision are self-care too, and when, as Maslach and Leiter argue, a good deal of what drives burnout sits with the organization and is not the individual's to fix alone.

Related tools on this site cover neighbouring ground. The Wheel of Life rates satisfaction across life domains, which overlaps with the self-care wheel but asks a different question: how happy you are with each area, rather than how you are tending it. The Self-Compassion Exercises help with the inner critic that a poor rating can wake up. If the professional segment keeps coming out worst, the Stress Management Worksheet goes deeper on workload and boundaries, and the ACT Values Worksheet helps you decide what the spiritual and personal segments should hold. And if the wheel shows you have been running on empty for a long time, a therapist can help you work out why. Psychology.com's directory is free to search.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the six-domain structure, the attribution to Phoenix and to Saakvitne and Pearlman, and the framing of the wheel as reflective rather than validated.

References

1. Saakvitne KW, Pearlman LA. Transforming the Pain: A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization. W. W. Norton; 1996.
2. Phoenix O. Self-Care Wheel. Olga Phoenix Project: Healing for Social Change; 2013.
3. Maslach C, Leiter MP. The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It. Jossey-Bass; 1997.
4. Figley CR, ed. Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those Who Treat the Traumatized. Brunner/Mazel; 1995.

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