Urge surfing: how to ride out a craving

An urge feels permanent. That is its most convincing lie, and everything else follows from it — if this is not going to stop, then giving in is not weakness, it is just accepting the inevitable slightly earlier.

It is not permanent. Left alone and observed, a craving builds, peaks and subsides, usually within about twenty minutes and often much sooner. But almost nobody knows this from experience, because there are only two things people normally do with a craving: obey it, or fight it. Both end the experiment early.

There is a third option. It comes from the addiction researcher Alan Marlatt, and it is called urge surfing.

The idea

A craving is a wave. It rises, it crests, it breaks, it goes. Fighting a wave is exhausting and you lose. Riding one takes skill and you stay up.

So you do not try to make the urge go away. You get curious about it instead — which sounds like a semantic trick and is in fact a completely different physiological experience, as you will discover the first time you do it properly.

How to do it

1. Notice and name it

Out loud if you can: "I'm having an urge." Not "I need a drink" — that is the urge talking. I am having an urge. You have just moved from being inside it to observing it, which is the entire manoeuvre in miniature.

2. Find it in your body

This is the part that does the work, so do not rush it. Where is it, physically? Chest? Throat? Stomach? Hands? Jaw?

Now describe it precisely. Not "unbearable" — that is a judgement. Is it tight, hot, fizzing, hollow, heavy? Does it have edges? If it had a colour, what colour? Does it pulse or is it steady?

Almost everybody discovers, doing this for the first time, that what they had been calling unbearable is in fact a tight band across the chest and a restlessness in the hands. Unpleasant, certainly. Not unbearable. That gap between the label and the actual sensation is where you get your leverage.

3. Breathe into it, do not push it away

Slow breaths, out longer than in. Imagine the breath going to wherever the sensation is. You are not trying to shift it — you are making room for it.

4. Watch it change

Keep observing. Does it get more intense? Less? Does it move? Does it change shape?

It will change. Urges are never static, though they feel it. And somewhere in the next few minutes you will notice the peak — and then, unmistakably, that it is coming down.

5. Ride it out

Stay with it until it has genuinely subsided. Time it, on your phone, the first few times.

People are consistently astonished by the number. It is a great deal shorter than anyone expects.

What to expect the first ten times

• It will feel like it is not working. That is normal. Keep going.
• Your mind will produce excellent arguments for stopping the exercise. Very good ones. Notice them; they are part of the wave.
• Some urges last longer than twenty minutes. Particularly early on, and particularly if something is actively triggering them. They still end.
• It gets easier. This is a trainable skill, and the tenth time is substantially easier than the first.

Why this changes things permanently

Once you have ridden out thirty or forty urges, something has shifted that does not shift back. You have direct, personal, repeated evidence that an urge is a temporary physical event that passes on its own.

At that point the urge stops being an emergency. It becomes weather — and you do not abandon your plans because of a forecast.

Relapse prevention · ACT for addiction