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 as it is.

But in hinting that Morning Pages might improve your life, I’ve already said too much: now there’s a risk you’ll try them in order to achieve that goal. Whereas their real value seems to come from putting that whole control-focused, goal-achieving mental machine to one side for a bit.

From Oliver Burkeman