An urge is not a command and it is not a countdown. It is a wave with a shape: it builds, peaks and subsides, whether or not you do anything. How long that takes varies by person, and anyone who gives you a number is making it up. The shape is reliable.
What breaks this is one specific error: believing the urge will keep rising forever unless you act. Under that belief, waiting feels like standing under a rising tide, so you act at minute four and never find out that minute twelve was flat.
The second error makes it worse. Thought suppression backfires, and it has been shown specifically for sexual thoughts: attempts to push them away produce a rebound of more of them. "Don't think about it" is an instruction to think about it.
The move that works with the wave is to turn toward it. Name it: "this is an urge." Find where it is in your body. Describe it without evaluating it: tight, warm, pulling, not awful or dangerous. Watch the intensity change. In the study that gave urge surfing its name, smokers given this instruction reported no fewer urges, and smoked significantly less over the following week. The urge did not shrink. The link between urge and action did.
Pair that with something physical decided in advance: leave the room, turn on a light, walk. In the app, that is what Panic is: one tap, a paced breath, then a short run of concrete steps built around your own triggers, all of it working with no signal.
Where this comes from
Read the full lesson: What an urge actually does →
Sources and how strong they are (2)
- Well establishedIn a randomised study of 123 undergraduate smokers undergoing a cue-exposure procedure, brief urge-surfing instructions did not reduce reported urges but did reduce smoking over the following seven days.
- Bowen & Marlatt 2009, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 23(4):666-671, doi:10.1037/a0017127, PMID 20025372
- Well establishedSuppressing a thought tends to make it more frequent once you stop suppressing — the rebound effect, found consistently across 31 experiments. Whether the thought increases while you are still suppressing it shows up only under additional cognitive load. On sexual thoughts specifically the evidence is indirect: the one study in this area is a cross-sectional survey of religious adolescents that models suppression as a mediator, not as a cause.
- Wang D, Hagger MS & Chatzisarantis NLD 2020, "Ironic Effects of Thought Suppression: A Meta-Analysis", Perspectives on Psychological Science 15(3):778-793, doi:10.1177/1745691619898795
- Does not report a rebound effect — Efrati Y 2019, "God, I Can't Stop Thinking About Sex! The Rebound Effect in Unsuccessful Suppression of Sexual Thoughts Among Religious Adolescents", J Sex Res 56(2):146-155, doi:10.1080/00224499.2018.1461796, PMID 29702013
More on urges in the app.
The full 41-lesson course is in the app, every claim graded the same way, and a Panic button for the moment an urge hits. Free.
Coming to iOS and Android.