Morning Pages thoughts
Apr. 9th, 2025 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chacushaKind of a random post, but I have been doing a practice called Morning Pages more-or-less every morning since 17 October. It's been an interesting experience, so I thought I would write up some of my experiences and findings so far having done this for about six months.
I first heard about Morning Pages on the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
getyourwordsout Discord server -- someone mentioned The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and wanted people's opinions on it as a writing advice book. A lot of people either didn't like it or said they gave up once it started getting a bit too religious/Christian/spiritual, but multiple people said they liked the Morning Pages technique and that was their main takeaway from the book. I was intrigued at this universal approval for Morning Pages, so I looked up more information online.
( More info on Morning Pages )
( Other miscellaneous observations )
Conclusion
So yeah, basically, I quite like doing Morning Pages, although they can be hard to fit in my schedule sometimes, and I'm honestly still not sure if they are overall worth it/helpful. They're not a cure-all -- for example, there are still hard/intimidating tasks I get avoidant about and even with Morning Pages and my awareness of my avoidant attitude toward those tasks, I am not sure I have been able to get any closer to tackling them.
Even though Morning Pages ARE time-consuming, I would ordinarily take some time in the morning anyway to make a to-do list for the day, and the way I do Morning Pages is basically to do that but in a more extra way, and sometimes they also come in handy to just vent out some feelings or frustrations or try to figure out where my stress is coming from. In that sense, I think they are kind of similar to a sort of mandatory two-hour meditation exercise at the beginning of the day. It's not always clear that that meditation time would be better spent doing something else, but it does help to focus me, and 90% of the time, my meditation time is spent on something productivity-focused (just a reflection of the kind of person I am -- I don't think Morning Pages has to be like this for someone else).
And already that mandatory reflection has helped me understand things about work/productivity, so I think those insights have been one good thing to come out of these Morning Pages at least (even if the insights might have been obvious to other people!).
I first heard about Morning Pages on the
getyourwordsout Discord server -- someone mentioned The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and wanted people's opinions on it as a writing advice book. A lot of people either didn't like it or said they gave up once it started getting a bit too religious/Christian/spiritual, but multiple people said they liked the Morning Pages technique and that was their main takeaway from the book. I was intrigued at this universal approval for Morning Pages, so I looked up more information online.( More info on Morning Pages )
( Other miscellaneous observations )
Conclusion
So yeah, basically, I quite like doing Morning Pages, although they can be hard to fit in my schedule sometimes, and I'm honestly still not sure if they are overall worth it/helpful. They're not a cure-all -- for example, there are still hard/intimidating tasks I get avoidant about and even with Morning Pages and my awareness of my avoidant attitude toward those tasks, I am not sure I have been able to get any closer to tackling them.
Even though Morning Pages ARE time-consuming, I would ordinarily take some time in the morning anyway to make a to-do list for the day, and the way I do Morning Pages is basically to do that but in a more extra way, and sometimes they also come in handy to just vent out some feelings or frustrations or try to figure out where my stress is coming from. In that sense, I think they are kind of similar to a sort of mandatory two-hour meditation exercise at the beginning of the day. It's not always clear that that meditation time would be better spent doing something else, but it does help to focus me, and 90% of the time, my meditation time is spent on something productivity-focused (just a reflection of the kind of person I am -- I don't think Morning Pages has to be like this for someone else).
And already that mandatory reflection has helped me understand things about work/productivity, so I think those insights have been one good thing to come out of these Morning Pages at least (even if the insights might have been obvious to other people!).
