If you are reading this while wanting to open porn, begin with something small: leave the page or feed that is pulling you in, and put the device down if you can. Then try urge surfing: watching the urge as a set of sensations that rise, peak and change, without obeying it and without fighting it.
You do not need to decide the rest of your life right now. The immediate task is to make room for a choice.
The steps below are general coping suggestions. They are not a substitute for treatment when the pattern repeatedly feels beyond your control.
Evidence strength: developing for mindfulness-based relapse prevention in drug and alcohol use, where effects on craving are small; early for urge surfing and mindfulness with porn specifically, which rests on one small pilot study.
What is urge surfing?
Urge surfing treats a craving like an ocean wave: it starts small, builds to a peak, then breaks and fades. Instead of fighting the wave or being pulled under by it, you pay close attention to it and stay on top until it passes. The US Department of Veterans Affairs uses exactly this image in its version of the exercise. VA’s exercise.
The technique comes from the psychologist Alan Marlatt’s relapse-prevention work on addiction, a cognitive-behavioural approach, and later became part of mindfulness-based programmes. Bowen and Marlatt. It was developed for substance use, not for porn. The four steps below adapt it.
Step 1: Name the urge
Try a simple description: “I am noticing an urge to watch.”
That is different from “I must watch,” and different from “I should never feel this.” You are describing an experience, not issuing a command or judging your character.
If it helps, add the context: “I am tired and alone,” or “I have just had a difficult conversation.” You do not need to find a deep explanation before taking a pause.
Step 2: Ride it out without arguing
The VA’s exercise describes noticing where craving is felt in the body, observing the sensations, and paying attention to how they change. The aim is to experience the urge differently, not to force it to vanish. This is general craving-management guidance developed in a substance-use context, not proof of effectiveness for porn use specifically. VA’s exercise.
A brief adaptation:
- Notice a sensation, such as tension or restlessness.
- Describe it neutrally rather than trying to explain it away.
- Breathe normally and notice whether the sensation changes.
- Let the next action remain a choice.
There is no required countdown. An urge does not have to disappear within a particular number of minutes for you to respond differently.
If inward attention makes you feel more distressed, stop the exercise. You can instead orient to the room, move to another setting, or contact someone supportive.
Step 3: Give your hands and attention somewhere else to go
Choose an ordinary, manageable action: make something to drink, step outside if it is safe, take a shower, or return to a task you had already selected.
This is not a claim that a walk treats problematic porn use. It is a way to make your next few minutes different from the sequence you were about to repeat.
If the action is only another screen-based search for stimulation, ask whether it creates the distance you intended. The useful alternative is the one that fits your situation, not the one that sounds most disciplined.
Step 4: Ask what else needs a response
An urge can arrive with sexual interest, boredom, worry, loneliness, or several things at once. Ask what you can reasonably address now.
If you need sleep, planning an intense late-night workout may miss the point. If you need contact, a message to someone you know may be more relevant than another solitary distraction.
Our guide to porn as a way to cope explores that second part of the pattern. If the same urges keep arriving in the same empty evenings, that is a longer-term question about your free time, covered in what to do instead of porn.
Does urge surfing actually work?
It seems to change what people do with an urge more than the urge itself. In a small experiment, 123 undergraduate smokers who wanted to change their smoking were shown smoking cues; half got brief urge-surfing instructions. Their urges were no weaker than in the comparison group, but over the next seven days they smoked fewer cigarettes. Bowen and Marlatt.
Larger programmes built around it show modest effects. In a trial with 286 adults who had finished treatment for drug or alcohol problems, eight weekly group sessions of mindfulness-based relapse prevention and of standard relapse prevention both lowered the risk of relapse compared with usual aftercare at six months; at twelve months the mindfulness group reported fewer days of drug use and heavy drinking. Some of the authors run trainings in the method. Bowen and colleagues. A meta-analysis of nine trials was more cautious: it found small effects on withdrawal and craving, and no clear difference in relapse, from low-quality evidence. Grant and colleagues.
For porn, there is one pilot study. Thirteen men diagnosed with compulsive sexual behaviour disorder took part in an eight-week mindfulness-based relapse prevention course; afterwards they reported spending less time on problematic porn use and less anxiety and depression. There was no comparison group, so it shows the idea is worth testing, not that it works. Holas and colleagues.
So urge surfing is a reasonable skill to practise, not a cure. The realistic aim is that more urges pass without becoming a session.
Plan for the next urge
You can repeat a pause. You can also ask for help. Neither means the first attempt was meaningless.
Between urges, write down when this one arrived and what came just before it, and decide one change for that moment next time. You can also make the next urge easier to interrupt, for example by blocking porn on your phone in advance. What a blocker can and can’t do is worth knowing first.
Acceptance-based therapy has shown promising results in a small porn-use trial, but a full therapeutic programme is not equivalent to practising one exercise on your own. Read the trial.
If urges repeatedly lead to behaviour you cannot keep within your chosen limits, look at professional support. If you have already watched, the next step is not punishment. Begin again from what happened.
For now, choose one action you can take without waiting for the urge to give you permission.
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