Three pages a day

That's why I think Morning Pages get to count not just as a form of self-therapy, but a form of meditation – a way of disidentifying from mental content, seeing your thoughts and emotions for the fleeting, insubstantial things they really are.

The technique famously originates with the creativity teacher Julia Cameron, and I recommend her short book The Miracle of Morning Pages if you'd like to know more. But my practice is easy to summarise: I write, by hand, until I've filled three sides of an A5 notebook with words no-one else will ever see. The length requirement is fixed, but apart ... See more

there's something transformative about achieving a third-person perspective on the contents of your mind by externalizing them on paper. You know how it's often easy to see what someone else needs to do about their problems? Externalising your thoughts can trigger similar insights on your own behalf. And even when it doesn't, the shift in perspecti... See more

Morning Pages is another tactic for getting out of your own way like this – a ritual, in a deep sense of that word, because what's key is the observance, not harnessing that observance for some particular outcome. Everyone should have one or two such rituals, if you ask me, to help unclench one's agitated grip on the world and to encounter reality

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