16/11/2025
Most young people can tell you they feel “fine”, “stressed”, or “angry”, but very few can say what’s really happening underneath.
At Wild Minds Pro we teach that emotions and feelings are not the same thing. This often surprises people, but it makes a real difference to emotional regulation.
Emotions are the body’s automatic responses to what is happening around us. They are fast and biological.
Feelings are the thoughts, interpretations, and personal meaning we attach to those emotional states.
When a young person says they feel “angry”, the emotion underneath might actually be fear, embarrassment, overwhelm or sadness. If they only have one word for many internal states, it becomes much harder for them to regulate, communicate or ask for support.
This is why we use the Wild Minds Wheel of Emotions. It gives young people a wider emotional vocabulary and helps them recognise what is really going on in their body before the feeling or behaviour takes over. Research shows that accurately naming an emotion helps settle the nervous system and gives the thinking brain a chance to come back online. For neurodivergent young people, this is especially important because emotional signals can feel bigger, faster and more confusing.
Over the next few weeks we will be sharing simple, accessible psychoeducation to help families, schools and professionals understand emotional development, executive functioning and regulation. These foundations sit at the heart of all the work we do with children and young people.
If you’d like to follow along, we’ll start with the basics: what emotions are, how they work in the body, and why identifying them is the first step towards feeling more in control.
