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The practices

Urge surfing: what to do while an urge is happening.

An urge isn’t a command, and it isn’t permanent. Urge surfing is the skill of riding one out — noticing it rise, crest and pass — without acting on it.

Adrian Smith·Writes from lived experience·

Urge surfing is a mindfulness technique for riding out a craving instead of fighting or obeying it: you notice the urge, locate it in your body, and observe it rise, peak and subside like a wave.

Where it comes from

Developed by psychologist G. Alan Marlatt (with Judith Gordon) in the 1980s as part of Relapse Prevention. It is not ACT-native — it’s used across ACT, DBT distress tolerance and mindfulness-based relapse prevention. The surfboard is Marlatt’s own metaphor: the breath is what you ride it on.

How to do it

  1. Name it. Say it plainly, out loud or on paper: “I’m having the urge to watch porn.” Naming converts a state you’re inside into an event you can observe. That gap is the whole technique.
  2. Find it in your body. Urges are physical before they’re verbal. Where is it? Chest, gut, throat, hands, the pull toward your phone. Pick the loudest spot and put your attention there.
  3. Describe, don’t argue. Is it hot or cold, tight or restless, heavy or fizzing? Does it have edges? Curiosity is doing the work here — you’re not trying to make it leave. Arguing with it feeds it.
  4. Breathe through it. Use the breath as the surfboard. You’re not breathing to get rid of the urge; you’re breathing to stay on top of it while it does what it’s going to do.
  5. Watch it crest. This is the part nobody believes until they’ve seen it. The urge builds, reaches a peak, and starts to fall — without you doing anything about it. Stay for the falling part. That’s the evidence.

Why it works on a porn urge

  • A porn urge feels like it will keep climbing forever. It won’t. Left unfed, urges peak and subside — Marlatt’s clinical account puts a typical unfed urge under half an hour, though honest answer: the precise duration isn’t well measured, and the numbers repeated online mostly trace back to other blog posts rather than a study.
  • Every time you ride one out without acting, the next one arrives slightly quieter. That’s ordinary learning: the urge stops reliably predicting the reward.
  • It works at 2am, alone, with no blocker, no accountability partner and nobody to tell. It needs nothing but you and about twenty minutes.

How WithAnchor does it

WithAnchor’s Urge Surf player gives you the wave in front of you — rising, peak, falling — with prompts timed to where you actually are on it, so you’re not guessing whether the worst has passed.

It’s one of six practices in the app — use one, use them all. There’s no order, no progression, and no badge at the end.

Sources

  1. 1.Marlatt, G. A. — “Surfing the Urge” (interview, Inquiring Mind): the origin of the technique and the wave metaphor.
  2. 2.Therapist Aid — Urge Surfing (clinical handout).
  3. 3.Dartmouth-Hitchcock — Urge Surfing (patient handout, PDF).

Adrian writes from lived experience, not clinical practice. Nothing on this site is medical advice. WithAnchor is a paid iPhone app made by Doffy Labs, so we have a commercial interest in you finding this useful. We cite primary sources so you can check the claims yourself.

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