The Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal

Some things happened recently that made me want a healthy outlet for expressing my thoughts and emotions, and so I decided to add morning pages back into my routine.

Morning Pages

Morning pages is a journaling method introduced in The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron, a self-help book about artistic creative recovery. In the morning, you fill out 3 pages of a notebook with whatever topics that come to mind. It’s supposed to be just a stream-of-consciousness mental dump of everything that you’re thinking, and you can write about anything. I always think that I have nothing to write and wonder how I’m going to fill out 3 full pages, but I also always manage to do it. It’s helped with my retention and creativity too. 

Apparently you’re supposed to do it right in the morning when you wake up, but my mornings can be quite hectic, so I usually just find any time during the day. These days, my morning pages are pages and pages of negativity, but I hope to eventually get to a place where I don’t focus too much on the negative, and instead write more about the things I’m grateful for. When you write something down, your brain remembers it better. If you only write about the negative thoughts and emotions you have, you’ll remember them the most, and you’ll feel as if your life is worse than it actually is.

For me, morning pages is an effective way to self-reflect on where I am now, mentally and emotionally. I’m looking to achieve mental clarity on where I am now, and then think about where I want to go, or not want to go. When I get to that stage, I’ll probably start using journaling prompts, which can be an effective way of getting asked those good questions that’ll make me reflect further, then switch to another technique called future self journaling, where I answer these same 7 questions every day.

Benefits of Journaling

Journaling is an expressive coping method, a technique that helps a person process negative thoughts, feelings, or experiences by releasing them. By putting these things on the page, they can have less power over you. Writing about negative events can be extremely cathartic. It allows you to “cage” your thoughts and emotions so that you can acknowledge that they’re there and process them over time in a healthy way, instead of doing something stupid or getting angry and picking fights with people in real life.

Journal App on GitHub

I have an irrational fear of people reading my journal hacking after I'm gone. Nothing wrong with what I write, but it's personal and I'd prefer that it remains private. So I built my own very simple journal app on GitHub, which is basically just a single text box with character count at the top (I journal in my native language so character count makes more sense than word count). When I'm done, I click the submit button at the bottom to delete what I just wrote, or simply close the page. This works for me because I've never been the type to find value in going back and reading my past entries. Having them saved would just make me anxious that someone else will find and read it.

Digital Journaling

Personally, I don't think it matters whether you handwrite or type your journal. For those who prefer digital journaling (and keeping in mind that I'm probably in the minority for wanting to destroy my journal entries immediately after I've written them) -- 750words.com is a writing site that encourages you to write at least 750 words (roughly equivalent to 3 written pages in a notebook), while gamifying the experience with streak counts and graphs visualizing the data about your writing, such as your sentiment and how often you use the same words. They recently switched over to a members-only system though, so a good free alternative is writehoney.com