Urge surfing timer
Urge surfing is a technique from relapse-prevention work: rather than fighting an urge or feeding it, you stay with it and watch it rise, level off and fall. It comes from Alan Marlatt and Judith Gordon's 1985 book Relapse Prevention, and it has been standard in cognitive-behavioural and mindfulness-based relapse work ever since. Nothing is required of you while it happens, which is the whole point of it.
The script is below, then a timer that paces your breathing at four counts in and four counts out. It runs in this page: no sound, nothing to install, nothing sent anywhere.
The script
- Stop what you are doing and sit down. For the next two minutes you do not have to do anything at all.
- Find where the urge actually is in your body — chest, stomach, jaw, hands, somewhere else. Put your attention there.
- Describe it plainly to yourself: tight, hot, restless, heavy. Words, not verdicts. You are reporting on it, not arguing with it.
- Breathe with the guide below, four counts in and four counts out, and keep watching the feeling change. It will change. That is what it does.
- Notice the crest, then notice the drop after it. You did nothing to make that happen, and it happened anyway.
The timer
2:00
Ready when you are.
It crested. You stayed.
Nothing here is recorded. Close the tab and there is no trace of it, on your device or ours.
Marlatt, G. A., & Gordon, J. R. (1985). Relapse Prevention: Maintenance Strategies in the Treatment of Addictive Behaviors. New York: Guilford Press. — Bowen, S., & Marlatt, A. (2009). Surfing the urge: brief mindfulness-based intervention for college student smokers. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 23(4), 666–671. doi:10.1037/a0017127.
Questions people ask
Does urge surfing work?
The honest answer is a split one. In the one controlled study of the instruction set itself, 123 student smokers were put through a cue exposure task; the group given the urge surfing instructions reported urges no weaker than the group given nothing, and smoked significantly fewer cigarettes over the following week. Read that as it reads: the technique changed what people did about the urge, not how strong the urge felt. It is one study, in smokers, and we have not found the same one run on pornography use.
How long does an urge last?
We do not have a number worth giving you, and neither does anyone selling one. Urges are generally described in clinical work as rising and falling over minutes rather than hours, and the round figures that circulate — twenty minutes, thirty — are not measurements of anything published. The number you can actually get is your own: time a few and you will know your own range inside a week.
Is urge surfing therapy?
No. It is one technique out of cognitive-behavioural and relapse-prevention practice, on a web page, with no clinician attached. It treats nothing and replaces nothing. If you are in danger or in crisis, contact your local emergency services or a crisis line.
Can therapists use this page with clients?
Yes, freely, and no attribution is wanted. There is no account and nothing logged, so a client can open it on their own phone afterwards and it behaves exactly the same. The lineage is cited above so you can check what is being taught rather than take our word for it. The same tool sits one tap from every screen in Unhooked, offline, where it is free whatever anyone does or does not pay.
Further reading
- Urge surfing: the technique, the script, and how to practice Urge surfing means riding an urge instead of fighting it. Where the technique comes from, what the one study found, and a complete script to read aloud.
- What to do when an urge hits Four moves, in order: change the room, cold water on the face, put a clock between the urge and the decision, then ride it out. Why that order works.