Basic Registration Exercise

The episode breaks down the process of registering thoughts and emotions in order to improve self awareness and better understand the situations that can trigger you in unhelpful ways.

For more information about Self Awareness listen to the past episodes listed below;

Awareness - Developing Internal Awareness - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2569749/episodes/18443070

Awareness - Groundhog Day - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2569749/episodes/18551511

Awareness - All I know, is that I know nothing - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2569749/episodes/18629116

Awareness - What I knew about myself has changed - https://www.buzzsprout.com/2569749/episodes/18879210

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hello and welcome to this episode of Small Steps with me, your host Stephen Davis from Interactive Therapy.

Introduction Basic Registration

SPEAKER_00 0:28

In today's episode, I will be explaining the exercise of basic registration. Now, this is the process of recording aspects of your life and then using them to help develop more self-awareness and insight into your behavior, emotions, and thoughts about the situations that you encounter. It's a slightly longer episode today, so I've added chapter markers for the elements of the exercise itself, making it easier for you to listen again in the future without having to go back over my introduction of the topic. I've already highlighted the benefits of developing self-awareness in earlier episodes. If you've missed those episodes, then the links are in the description below. What I've not yet covered in detail is what the brain does with information after the senses have received it and how outcomes are dependent on the kind of filters that we have created through our own experience. Filters or biases as they can be referred to can be positive. For example, if we see or smell a freshly made cake, then that could trigger thoughts or emotions about past enjoyable experiences of eating cake, maybe reminding us of how lovely it tasted. It may even motivate us to buy and eat more cake, or go home and make one ourselves. Filters can also be negative. For example, if you're lying in bed at night and you hear a loud bang in another room of your house, this may trigger thoughts and emotions of panic and you may associate the noise with a burglar who has entered your property. As a response, you may get out of bed and turn on all the lights or you may hide under the covers. Your sleep may also be impacted as you struggle to fall asleep again. The funny thing about these filters though is that they can lead to the creation of assumptions about the situations in which we experience them. And the filters of another person may trigger completely different thoughts, emotions and behaviours to those you experience yourself. Take the examples mentioned earlier. While for one person the experience of seeing or smelling cake could be positive, for another it may trigger thoughts of feeling sick due to having eaten too much cake or sweets in the past, or trigger emotions of shame if they have struggled with a negative body image and associate cake with being overweight. In the same way, while one person could experience a bang in the night as anxiety inducing, another could quickly recognise the sound as being the action of the cat knocking over an ornament or pot. It may not necessarily trigger happy thoughts to know that something has been knocked over, but at least that person is not so scared that they need to get up and check, or struggle to fall asleep again later. So the exercise of registration works to help you better understand yourself and see which associations that you have developed in your brain. So, in order to carry out this exercise, the process of registration can be broken down into three simple steps. In fact, I'd encourage you to start as simple as possible and if necessary, expand the amount of information being collected only as you get into a good habit of registering. Registration can be best written down on paper or saved in a note or online document via a smartphone. If you are registering regularly, then choose something portable to register with. The details you'll be looking to record include but are not restricted to the situation that has recently occurred or is maybe about to occur and its context, the emotion, intensity and duration of the emotional experience, and any thoughts, experienced or behavior identified in yourself. And these can be divided into sections to help your reflection process. So now I'm going to break down those three steps that you can uh that you can use.

Step One: Basic Registration

SPEAKER_00 5:05

And step one is as follows. Firstly, decide when you are going to register situations. Now you may choose to register only when something triggers you a situation at work for instance or an interaction with a friend or partner. This can be done shortly after the situation or later in the day. But don't leave it too long, otherwise you may forget what happened and how you felt. Alternatively, you may choose to register at regular intervals of the day, say every four or five hours, in order to capture reflections throughout the day every day. If you are going to register at regular intervals, then it can help to set reminders on your telephone or on your watch. And of course it's possible to combine the two methods registering at intervals and then registering specific events that happen in between.

Step Two: Basic Registration

SPEAKER_01 6:11

On to step two.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

So you've decided what you're going to register, so what details do you need to collect? Well primarily you can benefit from capturing information regarding your emotions and the facts surrounding the situation itself. The emotional state will be rated based on its intensity, with, for example, a 1 being a very low, intense emotional experience, like a nagging sensation that doesn't really impact your ability to function, but you feel it anyway. Or all the way up to a 10, which is the state of being completely overwhelmed by the emotion itself. The facts of the situation speak for themselves. Try and record them as objectively as possible. For example, note where were you? Who was present or were you alone at the time? Who said or did what, etc. Don't feel that you have to write an essay about your experience as the function is to provide yourself with enough information to be able to remember the situation and how it made you feel. Bullet points that jog your memory can be sufficient. An example of registration could be as follows. You have been told by your manager that the work that you did last week did not match what was expected from you. They have asked you to improve it by adding a few specific pieces of information and then show it to them when you are finished. This interaction makes you feel anxious and sad. You rate the anxiety high at a level of eight and the sadness at a level of six. Now if you're just starting with registration, this can be enough information to record. It may also help you to note the date and approximate time of the situation, as this can provide important information in your reflection. Step three, which we'll cover shortly, explores possibilities of expanding the registration. But this step is really the most important step as you're actually taking the time to record your experience and its impact.

Step Three: Basic Registration

SPEAKER_00 8:41

So on to step three. Expanding the registration is a possibility, but is often dependent on your current levels of self-reflection. Some people are quite aware, for example, of the thoughts popping into their heads in situations when they feel triggered. Whereas some people know how they feel but struggle to formulate the associated thoughts. If you struggle at the moment, then rest assured that with practice this will improve. Practice starts in the writing down your reflections in the basic way, highlighted in steps one and two, and then reflecting on them later. Asking yourself what about situation X made me feel emotion Y? If this remains a problem, then speak to a friend to get their interpretation of why you felt that way at that time. Maybe they can say how they would have felt at that time. Or if needed, seek professional support from a coach or psychologist. If you are aware of thoughts that appear, then note them down in another column on your registration. You may identify multiple thoughts related to your interpretation of the situation. Let's return to our registration from before from step two to give an example. So you felt anxious and sad when your boss told you that your work needed to be improved. The anxiety was the most prominent emotion, and perhaps you identified the thought my boss thinks I'm useless at my work and is going to fire me for making this mistake. I can certainly imagine feeling anxious if I were to think something like this myself. There may be other thoughts too which can be noted down and linked to your anxiety. So what could be thoughts that made you sad in this registration? Perhaps you thought losing my job will mean losing all my friends I've made while working for this company. Which again is potentially an understandable reason for feeling sad. So this concludes the three steps for doing the registration and for gaining more self-awareness. Remember that the goal of this process is to better understand yourself, so be honest with your interpretations, thoughts, emotions, and behaviour. It may be a bit confronting at first, but if you are looking to change your thoughts and behavior in the long term, then this is an important step. Good luck!