Hi everyone Emma McAdam here. Today I want
to share with you a quick technique for emotion processing. Now emotion
processing is the skill of noticing, naming, and slowing down what you're
feeling so that you can make good choices about it and move forward with
more calm and happiness in your life. So in this video I'm going to teach you the
SIFT technique. So the SIFT technique is a skill that's
been developed by Dan Siegel and he's a pretty well-known author in the field of
mental health and parenting and this technique can be used to help you gain
more awareness around what you're feeling, help you slow things down and
notice what's going on for you. So the SIFT technique is an acronym, "S" stands
for noticing what sensations you're having. So this is all about describing
what's going on inside of your body so if you're feeling upset or if you're not
feeling upset, whatever it is you're feeling you just take a minute and
notice what's going on inside of your body and you're just supposed to
describe what sensations you're having, what physical sensations you're having
inside of your body. So that might be things like noticing a feeling of
tension in your shoulders, or noticing that you have a headache, or noticing
that your legs feel relaxed, or noticing that your stomach feels upset. So the "S"
stands for sensation and you just notice what physical sensations you're having
right now. The "I" stands for images. so this is what kind of images or what kind
of impressions are going on in your mind right now. This might be pictures, it
might be impressions of like a scent or or a place or you know some kind of
almost visual something going on inside your mind, so an image of what? Some
people kind of visualize themselves like if you're really angry you might
visualize yourself beating someone up, or screaming or yelling but it might be
something even more subtle than that. It might just be the sense of you know
feeling trapped that could be an image that you're experiencing. So the "I" stands
for notice what images or imagery you're having inside of you know inside of your
mind. The next step in the SIFT technique is to notice your feelings. So at this
point we're actually going to try to notice and name an emotion going on
inside of you and you want to try and use an emotion word so a word like sad,
angry, happy, discouraged and the more descriptive you can get the better.
So they've they've shown that people you know there's hundreds of words for the
emotion anger and the more specific and the more precise you can be with your
language, the more descriptive you can be about what you're feeling that can help
you notice it better, sit with it longer and then make a better choice about it
in the future, and the last step that we notice in this
SIFT technique is "T" is for thoughts. What kind of thoughts were having. It's not
about you know really deep diving into those thoughts but just noticing what
thoughts are passing through your mind and Dan Siegel says you know we actually
don't know what causes thinking. We can't tell you what causes thinking. It's easy
to do a very simplistic explanation like oh these are neurons bleeping along in
your neural pathways in your brain but thoughts are pretty complex. So take a
minute and notice what you're thinking. So when you do the thoughts part of the
SIFT technique you want to just notice the thoughts that are going through your
mind and you don't need to get stuck on them or try and solve them, this whole
process is not about figuring out why, it's not asking "why am I feeling sad?", or
"why am I feeling angry?", or "why am I having muscle tension?". That is not what
the SIFT technique is about it's about what. This technique is about describing
what you're feeling. So if you practice the SIFT technique a couple of times a
day it can help you gain more emotional control by getting more awareness around
what you're feeling. It'll help you better understand how your thoughts and
your feelings and your physical sensations are all related and it can
help you gain a little bit more self-control and ability to regulate
your emotions and this is all just like one piece of the bigger process of
emotion processing. Which is working through your emotions, noticing them,
naming them, asking questions about them and then deciding what steps to take
around them. Anyways I hope you guys found this helpful thank you for
watching and take care. Hey everyone, real quick I just want to share
one very simple thing that you guys could do to save someone's life. So one
of my good friends she was a mentor to me in college just a really
wonderful person her only granddaughter has been diagnosed with bone cancer and
blood cancer and really the best treatment out there for that is a bone
marrow transplant but what they need is someone who's compatible and in order to
find someone who's compatible they basically need a lot of people to have
their information in the system so that's why today I'm gonna do a cheek
swab for Be The Match, so Be The Match is a repository they keep track of
people who are willing volunteers who submit their DNA through this really
simple process and that makes it so that little girls like Zoey can potentially
get the life-saving treatment that they need. So I'm just going to encourage all
of you to sign up on Be The Match, it's free they'll send you this little cheek
swab kit. it's painless you just swab the inside
of your cheek and there's no commitment but if they do find someone who is a
match for you then you could potentially save that person's life. So I'm just
gonna gonna do that cheek swab really quick and I'm gonna encourage all of you
to do the same so go to bethematch.org and check that out. Thanks very much. Just like that. Have a good day. Take care
everyone.
