What Are Morning Pages? A Complete Beginner’s Guide
A simple, slightly strange writing habit that helps a lot of people start the day with a quieter head. Here’s where it comes from and how to try it.
If your head feels crowded before the day has even started, you’re not alone. Morning Pages are one of the simplest ways people have found to make a little room. You don’t need special notebooks, prompts or talent. You need about twenty minutes and something to write with.
Where Morning Pages come from
Morning Pages come from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, first published in 1992 as a course for people who felt creatively stuck. In it, Cameron describes a daily habit: three pages, written by hand, first thing in the morning, about anything at all.
In the three decades since, the practice has travelled far beyond artists. Writers, founders, nurses, students and people who would never call themselves creative use it to start the day with a little less noise.
How the practice works
The instructions fit on a sticky note. Wake up. Before you check your phone or start your day, write three pages longhand. Don’t plan what to say. Don’t stop to fix spelling. When you reach the end of page three, you’re done.
The pages aren’t meant to be good. They’re meant to be done.
That matters. Morning Pages aren’t a diary, and they aren’t a draft of anything. Many people find the first page is mostly complaints and to-do lists, and that something more interesting shows up near the end. Others never get past the to-do lists. That’s fine too.
What to write
Whatever’s there. A worry about money. The dream you half remember. A conversation you keep replaying. The fact that you don’t know what to write. If nothing comes, write “I don’t know what to write” until something does. It usually does.
What research says, and what it doesn’t
Writing is not a treatment for anxiety or depression. If your thoughts feel heavy for a long time, talking to a professional is a good next step.
Common questions
Try it tomorrow
- Put paper and a pen (or your phone, in airplane mode) next to your bed tonight.
- Write before you check anything. Messages can wait twenty minutes.
- Don’t stop to fix anything. Keep the pen moving.
- Stuck? Write “I don’t know what to write” until something else shows up.
- Stop at three pages, or whenever you said you would. Then close the notebook.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
- Cameron, J. (1992). The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. TarcherPerigee.
- Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3).
- Scullin, M. K., Krueger, M. L., Ballard, H. K., Pruett, N., & Bliwise, D. L. (2018). The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(1).