Discord- use api to monitor channels

Hi all. I think I recall in a previous news episode Wendell mentioning something along the lines of ‘most of the time when he appears in discord it is probably just his bot monitoring chat for kewords or phrases so it can boop him when something he will probably be interested in comes up’
I’ve realised it’s pretty much impossible for me to keep up in a couple of channels I’m in, and I need exactly this solution.
I’ve downloaded the rewrite version of discord.py and successfully set up a bot capable of watching channels it is invited to, but that means I have to go to all the channels I’m in and ask them to add my bot.
Wondering if anyone out there has done this a different way? I think it’s possible to use my token instead of the bot token, (self-bot, which I’ve read is unsupported by discord but probably won’t get you banned unless you’re spamming)
Is that the method you use @wendell ?
If so, how do you grab the token, or complete the login without one?
Thanks.
Andrew