Coaching practices for Urge Surfing Riding the Wave of a Craving After a Setback

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • When a craving hits it feels like it’ll just keep building and building until I cave
  • Every craving still feels like the first one, just as overwhelming as ever
  • I gave in, and now I’m tearing into myself
  • The same situations set me off every time
  • The craving to pour the drink, raid the fridge, send the message lands like it absolutely cannot wait

Practices that may help

  1. Urge Surfing: Riding the Wave of a Craving
    Urge surfing means treating a craving like a wave — observing it rise, peak, and fall instead of either fighting it or acting on it. Drawn from Alan Marlatt’s mindfulness-based relapse prevention, it works because urges are time-limited and pass on their own when not fed. It is a well-established clinical technique for everyday cravings; for serious addiction, it belongs alongside professional support, not instead of it.
  2. Ride the wave to its peak and down
    Watch the urge rise, crest, and fall without acting — like a wave you are surfing.
    Urge Surfing: Riding the Wave of a Craving
  3. Build urge tolerance over time
    Deliberately expose yourself to urges without acting on them — tolerance grows with repeated, successful riding.
    Ride the Wave (Urge Management), Made Practical
  4. Ride the Wave (Urge Management), Made Practical
    "Riding the wave" is a mindfulness-based urge management technique: rather than acting on an urge or fighting it, you observe it as a rising and falling wave of physical sensation, without doing anything. Urges are time-limited; if not acted upon or fought, they peak and subside. The technique has observational support specifically in addiction contexts (urge surfing), and the underlying mechanism — that urges are temporary physiological events — is consistent with mindfulness and DBT research.
  5. Self-compassion when the wave wins
    When you act on the urge before the wave passes, treat the lapse with compassion — not as evidence of permanent failure.
    Ride the Wave (Urge Management), Made Practical
  6. Plan ahead for predictable triggers
    Decide in advance how you will surf the urges you know are coming.
    Urge Surfing: Riding the Wave of a Craving
  7. Urge Surfing: Riding Out the Impulse Without Acting
    Treat an urge to act impulsively like a wave — observe it rise and fall without being swept away.
    The STOP Skill: A DBT Technique for Crisis Moments
  8. Understand the anatomy of an urge
    Learn that urges have a beginning, a peak, and an end — and that acting on or fighting them changes the arc.
    Ride the Wave (Urge Management), Made Practical
  9. Surf the urge to avoid instead of obeying it
    Treat the avoidance impulse as a wave to observe and outlast, not a command to obey.
    Embracing Discomfort: Turning Resistance Into Growth
  10. Notice the urge as it arises
    Catch the craving early, the moment it starts, before it becomes an automatic action.
    Urge Surfing: Riding the Wave of a Craving

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