Does anyone still do morning pages? by kirk_pos

I picked up Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way about twenty years ago, did it seriously for about three months, abandoned it, and then kept doing just the morning pages for years after without the rest of the program. They helped most when I was doing journalism. Kept the internal editor quiet long enough to find an angle. Since I've moved to fiction full time I'm less sure. The novel requires a different gear. Morning pages can sometimes feel like burning fuel I need for the chapter. But this week I missed three days in a row and I noticed the prose got tighter in the wrong way. More defended. I think the pages do something for me that I can't quite describe, they loosen something that the column brain keeps trying to lock down. Curious whether anyone here has a strong opinion either way. Is there a practice you swear by that isn't the obvious productivity stuff?