What Are Morning Pages?

There are many different types of journaling, and different benefits that you can get from them. From the positivity of gratitude journaling, to the inspiration of dream life journaling, to the creativity of junk journaling.

In this post, we’re going to go over one type: Morning Pages.

What Are Morning Pages?

Morning pages are simply 3 pages of long hand stream-of-consciousness writing done in the morning. They’re meant to be done as soon as you wake up, right before you start your day.

The queen of creative recovery, Julia Cameron, coined Morning Pages in The Artist’ Way, a course in recovering your creativity. Along with Artist Dates, these pages are the tools, the non-negotiables, of the course.

We have up to 60,000 thoughts a day, most of these are going to be mundane, complaining, the same thoughts we had the day before. Cameron also calls them ‘brain drain,’ because that’s what they do in a way: drain the brain of all the mundane junk to get to the good stuff - the creativity.

In Morning Pages, you write down every thought that comes through your head, even if that’s your to-do list, wondering why you’re doing this, or simply ‘I don’t know what to write.’

Keep your hand moving across the page

Like a daily meditation or yoga stretch, Morning Pages benefits are cumulative and the longer you do them for, the more creativity you will see in your life. We often hold our creative ideas back, but these pages gradually allow us to let our creativity flow more freely, without the filter of fear of judgement or doubt at our abilities.

They also teach us that mood doesn’t matter. Sometimes we might think we need to be in the mood to write or journal or work on what we want to work on. There is no such thing as the right mood. Morning Pages teach us to show up, often kicking and screaming, and work from where we are.

Write past the censor

When we start to engage with our creative ideas and dreams, a little voice will start to pop up with all it’s negativity and derision.

Who do you think you are?

You should be doing something more productive than this.

You call this writing/music/art, this is crap.

And so on in a hundred different ways.

This little, yet mighty, voice can be called the inner critic or the censor.

We call it the inner critic because it rarely, if ever, has anything good to say. While it’s usually a negative voice, one of it’s main purposes is to keep us safe. When we start something new, our brains tend to freak out a bit. This is uncharted territory, our brains sense danger, so it employs this inner critic to beat us back into our safe little worlds where we’re less likely to be hurt.

We call it the inner censor because it stops the good stuff getting out. It makes us second guess what we’re doing, writing, painting, creating. Even if we are really excited and lit up by an idea, our inner censor will put a hand on it’s hip, look you up and down, and say really that’s what you’re going to wear. That’s what you’re going to create. You know I’m not judging you but everyone else is gonna…

This inner voice is what stops us before we even begin. Morning Pages train us to write past that censor. The act of writing our every thought for three pages essentially causes the inner critic to short circuit and allows new ideas, and creativity to sneak past.

Morning Pages teach us that the world won’t end if we write badly.

My experience with Morning Pages

Sometimes they are easy, sometimes they’re like pulling teeth. I have no idea what to write and have to drag myself through the three pages.

Sometimes though, useful insights and ideas come through - things I might like to do, or little lines I might want to use for poetry or songwriting.

My biggest issue has been getting up to do them. I’m by no means a morning person, and the biggest barrier has always been getting up a little earlier to do them.

Now, I simply do them from my bed, before I even have to get up. I put the alarm off and grab my Morning Pages notebook right from my bedside table.

When you start to see the benefits, you’ll find it easier to wake up and immediately land on the page too.

How to start

Personally, I like to do these pages in the plainest notebook I can find, or even those yellow legal pads. The reason for this is if I use a prettier notebook, I’ll start to subconsiously care about what I’m writing, or what a mess my handwriting is. We don’t want this. We’re training ourselves to write past the inner critic, not have it throw a hissy fit when it sees us using beautiful journals for trash. Because the morning pages will mostly be the rubbish at the top of our brains. It will barely pass as writing.

Alternatively, you could do just the opposite and use the prettiest journal and pen you can get your hands on, in an F-You to the inner critic.

Set your alarm 20 to 30 minutes earlier in the morning, and when it goes off, grab your notebook and start writing. It’s as simple as that.

In this post we’ve gone over what Morning Pages are, how they work and how to start.

Have you used Morning Pages? What has your experience been?