Want to boost your emotional IQ? Just spin the wheel!: It was invented in the Eighties by a top psychologist. Now the Wheel of Emotions is back. CLAUDIA CONNELL spends a week trying to shift her dial from midlife rage to unbridled joy [Eire Region]

ACOUPLE of weeks ago, if anybody had asked me to describe what sort of person I am on an emotional level, I would have used words like: balanced, confident, upbeat. Today, having scrutinised my moods for a week, I would have to scrap the above in favour of: irritable, miserable, old boot.

Why? Because according to my 'emotional wheel', my feelings are more negative than positive and words like 'rage, annoyance and loathing' seem to appear far more often than they should when I keep a mood diary.

To put it frankly, on paper, I look like someone I'd actively cross the street to avoid.

For the past week, I have been keeping track of my feelings with the aid of Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. This was invented by American psychologist Dr Robert Plutchik in 1980 but is very much back in vogue.

Although humans are said to experience around 34,000 different emotions, Dr Plutchik believed they all stem from eight primary ones: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust and joy.

These basic feelings can then intensify, or become milder, and each emotion has a polar opposite.

He created a wheel that captured all of this as a tool to help us improve our 'emotional intelligence' ? a concept that today, four decades on, is winning hundreds of thousands of Instagram hits and a cohort of celebrity fans.

With actresses such as Gwyneth

Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston encouraging us to be more aware of our feelings in order to conquer difficult ones, the wheel's ability to help us identify and measure them is bang on-trend.

Although there's no hard and fast way to use his wheel, Dr Plutchik's pretty diagram is intended to help us take a spot-check of our emotional temperature.

By working out precisely what we feel at any given moment, we can watch to see if, over time, any regular patterns emerge and then understand what the triggers are so we can modify our behaviour accordingly, rather than react in a state of stress.

In the past, I've been more of a 'just get on with it' type of person, but the uncertainty of the past two years has made me feel more vulnerable.

So, what harm could it do to...