How urge surfing helps resist unwanted impulses

I discovered urge surfing a while back and find it both fascinating and effective for dealing with short-term cravings—whether for candy, late-night snacks, social media, the impulse to check your phone, or the urge to refresh email and Slack during deep work.

This is not some woo-woo internet invention. The method was developed by Alan Marlatt in the 1980s as part of relapse-prevention therapy for addictions. Since then it has become part of established protocols in behavioral psychology, including cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP).

The first and most important thing to understand is the nature of an urge. It is temporary. It feels urgent in the moment, but it will pass whether you act on it or not. Like a wave, it rises, peaks, and then falls away. Once you truly grasp this, you no longer have to treat urges as commands. You can rely on the fact that if you sit with it, it will disappear.

The protocol builds on this understanding. Step one is recognition: when the urge appears, notice it. See it as an urge. Observe the sensations—tightness in the stomach, restlessness in the legs, thoughts like “I need this now.” Naming it already weakens its hold.

Step two is to surf it. Instead of resisting or giving in, you ride it out. You watch it rise, you stay with it, and eventually it breaks. Most cravings last only a few minutes if you don’t feed them. Often you realize half an hour later that it’s been gone for twenty minutes. Other times it fades so completely that you forget it ever showed up.

The name comes from this image. The urge is the wave. You don’t fight it or dive under it. You surf it until it passes.

I’ve used this most with my late-night addiction to candy. I still have ups and downs with long-term habit building, but as a way to handle cravings in the moment, urge surfing works every time I remember to use it. It’s fascinating. Simple, evidence-based, and surprisingly powerful once you internalize that an urge always goes away.