You Are Not Your Urge: How Urge Surfing Helps Men Overcome Porn Addiction Without Willpower
- Jake Kastleman
- May 6
- 4 min read
Author: Lukas Richard with Overcoming Porn Addiction
If you are interested in the subject of meditation, you may have heard the phrase "You are not your thoughts”. This is an important insight in Buddhist or Stoic philosophy, for example, but also in acceptance and commitment therapy.
This means that you don't have to identify with a thought. If I think that I'm not good enough, that doesn't mean that it's true. Jake Kastleman has often written about how negative thought patterns and emotions like shame and fear are among the causes of porn addiction.
We can now take the sentence “You are not your thoughts” and turn it into “You are not your urge”. When addicts feel an urge, the addictive behavior can feel like an automatism at that particular moment. We can experience an urge without acting on it, and it is simpler than we may think. Urge Surfing shows us how.
What is Urge Surfing?
The term “urge surfing” was coined by Dr. Alan Marlatt. Dr. Marlatt was a psychologist and considered one of the leading researchers on the subject of addictive behavior.
Dr. Marlatt was not only concerned with the theory surrounding this topic. He was particularly interested in how patients could overcome their problems (mostly alcoholism) or reduce their alcohol, cigarette or drug use. Dr. Marlatt therefore thought about various methods of relapse prevention. He called one of these methods “urge surfing”.
Riding the Craving Wave
Urge surfing can be seen as a form of meditation. In meditation, you focus your attention on your breath, different parts of your body or a mantra. In Urge Surfing, the focus is on the porn craving when you start to feel it.
You focus on the following feelings:
1) Do I feel the urge physically, or only in my thoughts?2) If the answer to the first part is yes, where do I feel the urge?3) Does the urge always stay the same, or does it get stronger and weaker?4) What are my thoughts during that process?
If we look at the first two questions, your heart could beat faster, your breathing accelerates or you may feel something like an adrenaline rush. We can then pay attention to those feelings without acting on the urge.You simply sit down and observe how the craving manifests itself, like a scientist who wants to find out how something works in nature. You don't put yourself under pressure, and you simply wait and see what happens.
There is another reason why this technique is called urge surfing. It’s like you’re riding the urge wave, rather than getting sucked under and tossed around. You can visualize the urges as waves; when the craving gets stronger, the waves rise, then they flatten out again.
Making the Technique More Effective
This technique can also be combined with other methods. I found one technique from Jake Kastleman's ebook The 10 Tools to Conquer Cravings personally very helpful. It’s Tool #6: Imagine a New Ending.
So, if I feel a craving for pornography and have observed this craving using urge surfing, I can finish this experience with Tool #6. If I notice that the urge is slowly subsiding, I can imagine how I will feel if I don't give in to the urge. In this way, I not only become aware that I am not my urge, but also have a positive vision as an alternative to relapse.
If you want to try urge surfing, you don't have to wait for an actual porn craving. You can also practice with everyday things like when you have an itch somewhere and want to scratch it. You can sit down and observe exactly where it itches and how the itching develops, and if and when it decreases again and disappears completely.
What is the Goal of Urge Surfing?
The main goal seems very clear at first: to avoid porn relapse. However, I would also like to point out the difference between this and willpower.
It can be quite automatic for us to believe that we need to use willpower to fight a craving by gritting our teeth. This approach is essentially celebrated in modern western culture.
We may also believe that it’s best to distract ourselves, for example by doing push-ups or other exercises whenever we feel the urge to watch pornography.With a mindfulness method like urge surfing, however, we do not fight any thought or emotion. We don't try to suppress the craving in any way (which doesn't work in the medium or long term), but simply let it be as it is. We observe the different stages, how it starts, rises, subsides and finally disappears completely.
Porn Cravings Don’t Last Forever
Going through this process teaches us two important lessons:
1) No urge lasts forever. It is always temporary and disappears again after a while.
2) We always have a choice. Just because you have a craving for X (for example, watching porn, eating a bag of potato chips, shouting at your boss, etc.) doesn't mean you have to do X. You can simply be aware of the craving and not act on it.
If I feel a craving for porn, I can just wait until it's gone again and nothing bad has happened. Then, I can do something positive instead that is in line with my goals and values.
As mentioned above, an urge sometimes feels like an automatism that you have to act on.
But if you instead observe the urge and see that it subsides and later disappears completely, you have proven to yourself that there is no automatic process. Realizing that you always have a choice is an important insight on the road to recovery.
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