Unhooked
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. One, two or five minutes: no sound, nothing to install.
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.
The timer keeps no score and no streak: it counts one round down and stops. Nothing here is added up across sessions.
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.
How the timer is paced
One, two or five minutes, and two is the default. The clock and the breathing circle are driven by a single animation loop reading the browser’s own frame timestamps, so the count does not slip if the tab is busy, and the display rounds up — the moment you press Start on a two-minute run it says 2:00, not 1:59.
The pace is four seconds in and four seconds out, held flat for the whole run. That is a plain even cadence rather than a named breathing method: there is nothing to learn and no ratio to remember, because the point of the page is the two minutes, not the breathing. The circle grows through the inhale and shrinks through the exhale as one continuous movement.
If your system asks for reduced motion, the circle holds still at its middle size and the words alone do the pacing — the same run, the same length, no movement. There is no sound and nothing autoplays.
What the timer does not do is judge the run. There is no score at the end, no streak and nothing counted across sessions, so a round you cut short is not a worse round than one you sat through. Sitting with two minutes of it is the technique working, not a target you missed. The line that appears when the clock reaches zero is put onto the page at that moment rather than hidden in it from the start, because a sentence saying it is over before it is over is worse than no sentence.
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, 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.