Morning Pages — how writing transformed my life

‘You can write about whatever’s on your mind: petty worries, soaring plans, angry tirades… I wish I’d started long ago. […] It will change your life.’ Says Oliver who writes for the Guardian.

I was introduced to morning pages by a friend of mine in a casual call we had during a Skype call. I was looking it up online and found this article, written by a journalist by the name of Oliver Burkeman. He describes how he allocates time in the morning to write his thoughts on paper and he describes how useful he finds to have developed the habit of writing each morning. He is a journalist and his profession is to write and thus he was not keen to add more writing on top of his otherwise busy day’s, more so because he does not earn anything with it as he usually would as a journalist.

For me writing has always been difficult, it is not a talent of mine and it takes energy, as well it is time-consuming for me to write quality content. The only way I could write my morning pages was to speak out loud what I think or the momentary thoughts which cross my mind in the morning. I’ve discovered that my smartphone is actually able to transform speech into written words — that way I was able to talk out loud what I am thinking and my phone wrote one paragraph after another in my virtual notebook. That made me very happy and for me, it was the only way I could manage to do my morning pages because I could not think of taking a pen and write actually on a piece of paper.

When I shared the idea of the writing exercise and the technique I use, with a friend of mine, she said she will give it a try. After a couple of days, she came back to me and told me how cool she finds this idea and that the thoughts she speaks out loud are far different than the thoughts she has when she actually writes with a pen. Basically, she confirmed my experiences which I have made with this routine.

For me and maybe that is true for many of us, we sometimes have thoughts circling in our brain which are keeping us busy and we might be angry or concerned with a particular topic and bothered by it. I found when I write it down it does not bother me any more, it is out of my system. It is as if I would be able to spit it out in a way. Whether writing it down on a piece of paper or speaking it out loud and seeing the written text on my phone has the absolute same effect for me. Instantly I feel better and it frees me from the topic, it is liberating in a way. I love doing this it makes me more complete and helps me to digest situations which otherwise might bother me for hours or even a couple of days. Also, I am able to take learnings from experiences and it makes me more aware of what I have done, achieved or what I went through. It helps me to lay out and look at my life and experiences from another angle. That is very revealing and eyeopening at the same time.

In the article mentioned above, Oliver describes performing this routine on a daily basis. For me this did not work, I was not always in the mood to either take the time nor I have had things spinning in my hear, or the feel, or the need for it and thus performed the routine rather infrequently. Over time the routine changed slowly and also the topics changed. Now I do write in a little black notebook with my beloved fountain pen and it feels just right.

My conclusion on the morning pages is that I was really surprised how good it actually feels when I write down what I have experienced or what has bothered me or occupied my brain. It helps me to let go and it offers me to learn from the past. I can highly recommend you to start dictating to your phone or writing your thoughts on paper, you might find this very useful and appealing too!

My best wished to you, with appreciation,
Uwe

PS: I have been doing this now since quite a while and in a consecutive manner, it became part of my morning routine and I am so happy that I do this, it really is a good start in the day and gives me more time to enjoy my coffee! Let me know if this story has inspired you to do the same of what you do different and what we can learn from you, write a comment or shoot me a message, I’d love to hear from you!