If I skip writing my Morning Pages for more than a day, my head gets cloudy.

Every morning, I like to sit down and write to myself. This simple habit makes me happier and more relaxed. And it can be as easy as writing 100 words on a napkin.

But how can such a small thing have any impact on the clarity of your mind?

What are Morning Pages?

Morning Pages are a concept from the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.

There she describes it as an exercise to nurture your creativity by writing several pages of text every morning. And it has just one rule: Keep writing until you wrote a chosen number of pages. (I think she recommends three.)

But it doesn't matter what you write. You can write about writing those pages – as long as you keep writing. It could look like this:

Hey. I'm writing my morning pages. What am I thinking about? Okay. I think I'm a little nervous about the presentation today. I'm not sure why exactly. Well, it's pretty important and I think I'm feeling a bit guilty that I didn't prepare more thoroughly. But on the other hand, I did spend half a day on it yesterday so I shouldn't beat myself for it. Well, it will go one way or the other. Whatever. I also want to buy a new ... "

As you can see, it's an unfiltered flow of words that sometimes takes you to interesting insights, and sometimes just helps you to organize your thoughts.

How I use my Morning Pages

Now, it's important to say that I don't use Morning Pages to feed my creativity. Even though it sometimes has that side effect, I use it mostly to tidy up my mind.

Make it easy

For me, the original exercise evolved into something easier that better fits my needs.

These days, I rarely write more than a few paragraphs. I keep it short and simple.

I open the page, take a sip of hot coffee, and ask myself:

What is going on?

And something always pops up:

• Sometimes it's a little thing: Like a frustration that the N-key on my keyboard isn't working properly. So I write about it.
• Sometimes it's a bigger thing: Like a misunderstanding with a co-worker. They said something I disagreed with, I didn't say anything back, and now it's bugging me. So I write about it.
• And sometimes I bump into something huge: Like a deeper dissatisfaction with my job or relationship that lurks under everything else I do. So I write about it.