Time to turn observation into a map. Pull up the urges you've logged and look for the patterns rather than the incidents.
Sort your triggers into four buckets, because each one takes a different countermeasure.
Situational — a place, a device, a time, a posture. Laptop in bed. 11pm onward. Home alone on a Sunday. These respond best to environment design: change the situation and the urge often never fires. The cheapest wins in the whole course live here.
Emotional — what you're using it to regulate. Anxiety, loneliness, boredom, anger, post-conflict deflation, the specific flatness after a bad day at work. These need a replacement that actually does the same job. A cold shower does not fix loneliness.
Physical — tired, wired, hungover, understimulated, restless with no other outlet. Often the most fixable and the most ignored. A lot of what people interpret as a willpower problem is a sleep problem.
Social — an argument with a partner, rejection, a stretch with no human contact, a group chat that goes a certain way.
Most people find two or three combinations account for the large majority of their episodes. That's the good news: you're not defending an infinite perimeter. You're defending three doors.
Takeaways
- Four kinds of trigger, four different countermeasures.
- Situational triggers are the cheapest wins available to anyone.
- Two or three combinations usually account for most episodes. Three doors, not a perimeter.
In the app, this lesson ends with a practice
Name your top three patterns, and which door each one comes through.
Sources and how strong they are (4)
- Mixed evidenceIncreasing the friction of a behaviour - moving the cue further away, reducing availability, breaking the sequence that leads to it - reduces how often it occurs. The direction is consistently found and the effects are moderate, but the evidence is graded low-certainty, comes mostly from short laboratory studies of food, and has never been compared head-to-head with intention-based approaches. What is separately well established is that intentions on their own translate weakly into behaviour.
- Hollands et al. 2019, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews CD012573.pub3, doi:10.1002/14651858.CD012573.pub3, PMID 31482606
- Webb & Sheeran 2006, Psychological Bulletin 132(2):249-268, doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.2.249
- Wood & Neal 2007, Psychological Review 114(4):843-863, doi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843
- Mixed evidenceHabitual behaviour is usefully taught as a four-part loop — cue, craving, behaviour, relief — in which the relief reinforces the cue-behaviour link. This is a teaching model from popular behaviour-change writing, not a finding. The established science underneath it is narrower: habits are context-response associations strengthened by repetition in a stable context, and whether a craving is a necessary stage is exactly the contested part.
- Wood & Rünger 2016, Annual Review of Psychology 67:289-314, doi:10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417, PMID 26361052
- Well establishedAcute alcohol impairs the ability to withhold a response that is already prepared, and causally raises stated intentions toward sexual risk-taking. A meta-analysis of human laboratory studies puts the inhibition effect at g = 0.41 (95% CI 0.35-0.47), larger at higher breath alcohol concentrations and larger when the task has first established a prepotent response. Across 30 experimental studies, drinking increased intentions to have unprotected sex (d = 0.24 to 0.35), and the effect was larger when sexual arousal was already high. The usual explanation is alcohol myopia - that intoxication narrows attention onto whatever cue is most immediate, so the near cue wins against the distant consequence. That is the leading explanation, not a separate finding, and alcohol expectancy remains a live rival account.
- McPhee & Hendershot 2023, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 152:105274, doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105274, PMID 37277010
- Scott-Sheldon et al. 2016, AIDS and Behavior 20(Suppl 1):S19-39, doi:10.1007/s10461-015-1108-9, PMID 26080689, PMC4683116
- Rehm, Shield, Joharchi & Shuper 2012, Addiction 107(1):51-59, doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03621.x, PMID 22151318
- Steele & Josephs 1990, American Psychologist 45(8):921-933, doi:10.1037/0003-066X.45.8.921, PMID 2221564
- George 2019, Journal of Sex Research 56(4-5):409-424, doi:10.1080/00224499.2019.1588213, PMID 30958036
- The direct tests of attentional narrowing are more mixed than the inhibition meta-analysis — Riedel et al. 2021, PMID 33660080
- The direct tests of attentional narrowing are more mixed than the inhibition meta-analysis — Bayless & Harvey 2017, PMID 27697911
- AnecdotalWhether drinking makes a pornography urge more likely has never been tested. There is no alcohol-administration experiment, and no event-level or daily study, with pornography use as the outcome. The whole literature connecting the two is eight cross-sectional surveys, in which alcohol is the most-studied substance and is positively but weakly associated with problematic use - an association that did not survive adjustment for age and sex in the study that tried it, and that did not predict anything in the one daily-diary study. Alcohol does not appear at all in the only systematic catalogue of self-reported triggers in this population. Someone who says drinking sets them off is reporting their own experience, which may well be accurate for them; they are not reporting a finding.
- Dubois, Danielson, Schwirtlich, Beestrum & Eurich 2025, PLOS Global Public Health 5(11):e0004946, doi:10.1371/journal.pgph.0004946, PMID 41223162 (protocol registered on OSF, doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/86X34)
- Borgogna et al. 2025, Journal of Behavioral Addictions 14(1):155-165, doi:10.1556/2006.2025.00008, PMID 39964457
- Stasica & Binkowska 2026, Frontiers in Psychiatry 17:1863547, doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1863547, PMID 42389398
- Fernandez, Kuss & Griffiths 2021, Archives of Sexual Behavior 50(2):711-728, doi:10.1007/s10508-020-01858-w, PMID 33403533, PMC7889567
- Uses pornography as the stimulus rather than the outcome, so not a source here — Norris & Kerr 1993, PMID 8410953
- Uses pornography as the stimulus rather than the outcome, so not a source here — Davis et al. 2006, PMID 16893966
Questions this lesson answers
More on patterns in the app.
The full 41-lesson course is in the app, every claim graded the same way, and an evening check-in that maps your own patterns. Free.
Coming to iOS and Android.