Unlock Your Subconscious: The Power of Morning Pages

Your most powerful tool is your creative mind. It’s what separates us from the animals, and contains the power to change the world. Getting that creativity to kick in, however, is not always easy to do.

Or, isn’t it?

I’ll show you the most important trick to getting my creativity locked in, and it’s the first thing I do every morning. After pouring coffee, of course.

Getting to the first page

A couple years ago, when I told my wife about a podcast I’d listened to by psychologist Jordan Peterson, she suggested I listen to his talks on the Bible. I knew Peterson as the guy who took a lot of heat in Canada for speaking out against the pronoun regulations imposed on some of the universities up there. It turns out, he also did a bunch of work on how the Bible and other ancient stories can inform our behavior and psychology of today.

So I started with the earliest Bible talk in his podcast series, on Genesis. To put it gently, it blew me away.

I won’t try to summarize it here – you should listen to it. The concept that stuck out to me was that we go through life in a dreamlike state, where reality mixes with our imagination in a way that creates a special world for each of us. We interact with the real world through this half-dream state. Our dreams, in turn, can help us to solve certain problems in real life.

Everybody dreams, though not everybody remembers every dream. Some people remember none of their dreams, some people not only remember their dreams but can act with agency inside their dream (“lucid dreaming”). Most of us remembers a few dreams now and then. And sometimes, those dreams give us ideas that are actually useful in real life.

Putting this all together, I decided to resume a practice I’d started back before my first boy was born – Morning Pages. I did morning pages for a few months, then fell off. After listening to Peterson on the Bible, I started anew, with the goal of at least writing down any dream fragments I could remember, each morning, as soon as I woke up.

What are morning pages?

Morning Pages are not a completely new idea, but they were popularized by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way. Cameron is known as, not a productivity guru, but creativity guru. I may or may not have heard the idea from her (I don’t remember), but here is what she says about them:

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. Source

The goal here is to get all the mess out of your head, and get to the good stuff right at the beginning of the day. Think of using a honing steel to prep a kitchen knife – you’re straightening out the blade, getting rid of a few kinks, getting ready to cut. Or, letting the sink run on hot for a little bit to push the lingering cold water out, until the hot water starts flowing.

You’re prepping your mind to take hold of the day.

The rules are laid out in Cameron’s instructions above:

1. Use a pen or pencil
2. Start writing on a piece of paper as soon as you wake
3. Keep writing until you’ve filled three sheets of paper

Since this takes about a half hour to 45 minutes, you might be thinking “why not just bang it out on a computer in half the time?” Nope. You write too fast on a computer. The goal is NOT to go fast, but rather to go slow.

When I wake up in the morning, more often than not I start thinking about all the things I need to do in the day. Rapidly. My morning pages don’t stop the train of thoughts, but rather they force me to think more deeply.

It forces you to think through your ideas.

It’s not just going slow that’s important. Writing on a piece of paper is far less inhibiting than on a computer. While you’re writing, you can jot a little note at the top or in the margin. You can draw a little picture or circle some words for emphasis. You can make a paper airplane when you’re done.

The pen and paper help kick start your creativity.

The benefits of morning pages

For those of us who find ourselves easily distracted from the goal of raking in riches, these pages offer an immediate warm up for concentration and a focus on being our best.

If you get up early enough, the morning is really peaceful. Grab a cup of coffee, open the window, and smell the fresh morning air. Nobody is there to distract you. Your partner isn’t texting reminders to you. The kids are still asleep (maybe).

The morning tends to be devoid of distraction, so you can get to know how your mind works in a controlled environment.

The pages you write in the morning give you a chance to think through things you have to do, or ideas you didn’t have time to explore the day before.

For example, I’m supposed to be writing an article on the discoveries made about the Moon since the Chinese started bringing back fresh samples with their Chang’e-5 and Chang’e-6 missions. I haven’t had time to think much about this article recently, beyond doing keyword searches and grabbing links to articles. This morning, I took the time to write down some ideas and questions I want answered. Did we find out more about the nature of water on the Moon? Do we know more about why the lunar far side is so different than the near side? How has the “giant impact” hypothesis of the Moon’s origin been challenged by the samples?

Morning pages can help soothe a troubled mind. If you wake up stressed about a fight you had the day previous, or something important coming up today, just the act of writing on a piece of paper helps to calm you down.

It’s a moment of mindfulness. It engages your senses of vision, hearing (the crinkle of the paper, the pen on paper), touch (roughness of the paper, motion of the hand). Even taste and smell if you like coffee or tea in the morning. Engaging these sensed perceptions helps to ground us and get control over our feelings.

How to start

So, now that you have a burning desire to start, it’s time to buy a fancy Clairefontaine notebook and grab your most expensive fountain pen, with some Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo ink, and set that alarm for 5:00am.

Wrong.

I tried doing something like that at first, and it just didn’t hold. Here are some tips that helped me both do the habit, and keep the habit.

1. Get cheap supplies

I use a Bic clic stick pen with a pad of yellow paper. The paper is the cheapest I could find, and the Bic is my favorite cheap pen.

When you write, you can’t be concerned with wasting paper, or making sure everything is perfect. You need an abundance of supplies.

If you stress about supplies, you’ll never get past a day or two of this.

2. Just keep writing

You’re sitting there, staring at the page, not sure what to write next. Just write “I don’t know what to write next.” Then write it again.

You’ll find that eventually, you’ll want to write something else. These mornings are almost magical. You have good ideas in your mind, you just need to squeeze the crap out of the way.

Keep going!

3. Try to write all three pages

If you don’t see a benefit to writing these pages, you won’t stick to it. Try to keep writing all the way to the end of the third page. That’s long enough that eventually, you’ll get to the good stuff. Often, I find that the last paragraph I write contains the real gold, that leads to either a great article or a great idea for my family.

4. Do not censor yourself

Nobody’s going to read these pages. Maybe you will later on, but nobody else will.

So, write the garbage! Write out your most embarrassing thoughts. Write out your guilty secrets. Write about how you secretly think the guy at the store smells like cow shit. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is that, by writing out what is really on your mind, you get to know who you really are.

5. Put it in an easy spot

Tonight, pick out where you will write tomorrow morning. Put your pen and notepad on that spot so it’s all ready for you to go. You want to be able to start no matter what state of mind you’re in.

Wake up, get some coffee, and go sit. There is nothing in your way to writing your morning pages.

So tomorrow morning, grab a pen, some paper, and start writing. Remember, there’s no right or wrong way to do morning pages. It’s about your journey, your thoughts, and your growth. Give it a try for a week, and see how it transforms your mornings, and perhaps, your life.

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