Urge surfing is the most misunderstood tool in this space, because people try it expecting it to make urges go away and conclude it doesn't work when it doesn't.
It isn't for making urges disappear. It's for decoupling the urge from the action. In the original study with student smokers, brief urge-surfing instruction produced no significant difference in reported urges — and a significant reduction in cigarettes smoked over the following week. The urges stayed. The automatic link between urge and behaviour weakened. That's the mechanism, and it's the right thing to want.
The technique, and it's genuinely this simple:
- Notice and name it. "This is an urge." Naming it converts an atmosphere into an object. You can observe an object.
- Find it in your body. Where is it, physically? Chest, gut, throat, hands, a restlessness in the legs. Urges have a physical location and most people have never looked. Looking is most of the work.
- Describe it, don't evaluate it. Tight. Warm. Buzzing. Pulling. Not: awful, dangerous, proof I'm broken.
- Breathe and watch it move. Intensity changes. Note it going up. Note the plateau. Note when it eases.
- Don't fight it. This is the counterintuitive bit and the whole point. Fighting is a form of engagement — thought suppression rebounds, reliably, including for sexual thoughts specifically. You're not pushing the wave away. You're floating.
Expect discomfort. Urge surfing isn't a comfortable trick; it's tolerating something unpleasant while doing nothing. That's a skill and it improves with reps, like any other.
Takeaways
- The urge doesn't shrink. The link between urge and action does.
- Find it in the body and describe it. Looking is most of the work.
- Fighting it is engagement. Floating isn't.
In the app, this lesson ends with a practice
Six minutes, five steps. Rate it before and after.
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
Questions this lesson answers
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.