What is ‘urge surfing’ and how does it help beat addiction and break bad habits?
The technique manages cravings and compulsive behaviours like phone addiction by encouraging people to ride out their urges like waves
How many times have you promised not to check your socials again or pour another drink – only to do exactly that minutes later?
A technique known as “urge surfing” asks us to do something surprisingly simple instead: notice the craving, stay with the discomfort – and let it rise and fall like a wave rather than satisfying it.
The approach has been around for years, but it is finding life beyond addiction clinics in conversations about all kinds of compulsive behaviours.
Its roots lie in the work of the late relapse-prevention pioneer Alan Marlatt and psychologist Sarah Bowen, who incorporated it into Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP).
When Bowen and Marlatt began working at the University of Washington’s Addictive Behaviours Research Centre in the US, “we took that metaphor and sort of breathed life into it and made it into an actual practice rather than just a useful metaphor to understand a concept”, says Bowen.
She describes it as a form of exposure and response prevention: exposing oneself to something triggering, noticing the conditioned reaction and learning that another response is possible.