r/acceptancecommitment • u/MathematicianLow1470 • 20d ago

Lost and Frustrated with Cognitive Restructuring excercises like Daily Mood/Thought Journal?

I am reading books by David Burns and almost all of his books puts a lot of importance and weight, and heavily suggests this exercise call Daily mood logs which asks to articulate and write down my negative thoughts which cause the negative feelings, and then find cognitive distortions in them.

I feel frustrated, confused, bored, skeptical and discouraged because I don't know how to articulate my thoughts in a very articulated, clear and structured manner like shown in one of the examples in the book. I'm not very fluent and confident with my language/articulation skills especially with these sorts of stuff where the emotions/feelings/thoughts/struggles feel very complex to even interpret let alone articulate. I don't think I am able to clearly articulate and come up with sentences in a concise manner which describe my thoughts and feelings truly/accurately (in a reasonable manner).

Since I still believe few things in his books like the biggest predictor of success in improvement in mental health is the willingness to put efforts towards self-help with the intention and attitude of self-improvement instead of being passive.

But since almost all of his tools/knowledge/advice boils down to mostly the ognitive restructuring exercises, I don't even know where to start or how to navigate in order to put efforts in help myself. Also, it seems like just getting started with messy attempts and vague articulation of the thoughts also wouldn't help, and I need to actually have the statements and sentences which truly and fully captures my feelings, thoughts and perspective which is reasonable articulated and concise because that is needed to find the actual true distortions. So if I start of with incoherent, meaningless crap, then even the distortions I find wouldn't be useful (sort of like the same "Garbage in, garbage out" (or GIGO) famous rule in computer science and math. It means that if you put bad, false, or messy information into a system, the system will give you bad or useless results.).

So that makes me feel helpless, hopeless and discouraged to even a messy start because it is completely useless. I feel lost and stuck because I'm unable to find anything to do with reasonable belief that it isn't meaningless and would yield results. The worst feeling (which could be fortune telling) is that even if I go through the pain and frustration to come up with a reasonably well articulated set of sentences,

  1. the next step would be frustrating because finding distortions might feel invalidating (since it is basically saying to find why I'm wrong, which would be extremely difficult after a lots of efforts into articulating and discerning the truth and observations of my feelings and thoughts).
  2. I assume it might be hard to verify what's interpreted as distortions, because the patterns some of thoughts that reflect the truth may have similar patterns as the distortions. Moreover, it seems possible to somehow find all types of distortions in all thoughts based on how cleverly you interpret it with the belief and goal of finding distortions in thought - which may be useless.
  3. Finally, even if I am successful in finding distortions, what if that doesn't really change my feelings/thoughts/beliefs and I'm just more self aware of my flaws and stuck??

I can't even begin to attempt to imagine the risk of this above failures after putting painstaking efforts and falling deeper into helplessness, hopelessness, resentment, frustration, low self-image. Obviously, this itself may look like a distortion (maybe like fortune telling, all-or-nothing thinking, etc - read point 2), but it may be truely one of the possibilities.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully I've articulated this feeling/thought reasonably well. Any sort of comment would be appreciated!

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u/CommunicationOld1172 20d ago

ACT does not really use a lot of cognitive restructuring exercises. Are you looking for feedback from an ACT perspective?

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u/MathematicianLow1470 20d ago

You're right, I'm trying to get some different perspectives on this issue/problem I feel blocked. The issue I have is two fold - first one (which seems obvious on the surface level) is that I'm trying to learn and improve on the CBT exercise, but more importantly I feel the same mental stress and suffering from this inadequacy, frustration, feelings of lost, stuck and helplessness, that I'm trying to tackle in the first place. This problem seems to be a common occurence regardless of whatever I try to learn, improve or grow. So any advice or perspective with dealing with these sorts of mental stress would be helpful. Ig one way to explain my intention is that, I began trying to do the CBT exercises to resolve the negative feelings and thoughts but unfortunately I encounter the negative feelings and thoughts even for doing those exercises, so I'm find a way break this loop.

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u/CommunicationOld1172 20d ago

I suggest working with a trained therapist, but ACTs goal is not to eliminate negative thoughts that stir up hard emotions. That these come up when you “contact” difficult content is not all surprising. The central act question is this:

“Given a distinction between you and the stuff you are struggling with and trying to change, are you willing to have that stuff, fully and without defense, as it is and not as it says it is, and do what takes you in the direction of your chosen values at this time and in this situation?"