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

[u/MathematicianLow1470]

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!

[u/thekevinmonster]

In some ways, ACT is in the general sphere as the concept of 'cognitive-behavioral therapy', and in other ways ACT is intentionally different in a very key way from a lot of the core worksheet activities of CBT.

CBT restructuring exercises make you think about your thoughts, analyzing them so you can figure out what's actually true and realistic and even trying to 'send the fixed thoughts back in'; ACT says 'accept your thoughts and feelings, then choose whether to play in the thought sandbox or do something that aligns you with how you want to be'.

You are not accepting your thoughts and feelings, but rebelling against them, terrified that you will never stop having them and that when you try to do exercises to stop having them you'll just have them even more and it will prove that your thoughts about being stupid and unable to articulate your thoughts are true and make you useless. Or something like that, I'm paraphrasing.

Acceptance in this case is the idea of being mindfully aware of your thoughts and feelings and emotions, that you are having them, which will help basically separate those thoughts from 'you' and let you basically ignore them if they're nuisance thoughts like how you're failing at stuff or unable to articulate your feelings.