Habits & Urges: Riding Out Cravings with BLS

Most urges to check your phone, grab a snack, or snap at someone build, peak, and fade on their own if you don’t act. Ground yourself first, then ride it out: name the urge, breathe, and add a few rounds of bilateral stimulation (BLS), the left-right technique used in EMDR. Stop if distress passes 7 out of 10.

The urge shows up before you’ve decided anything: the phone already in your hand, the second helping halfway to your plate, the sharp reply forming before you’ve thought it through. It can feel less like a choice and more like something happening to you, a wave that’s already crashing before you notice it building.

What’s actually happening when an urge hits?

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines a craving as an unrelenting desire, urge, or yearning, one of the clinical markers used in diagnosing a substance use disorder. Everyday urges, even the ones with no diagnosis attached, tend to follow the same shape: they build, peak, and fade, whether or not you act on them. That’s the idea behind “urge surfing,” a mindfulness technique built around watching an urge like a wave instead of fighting it or feeding it. In a 2009 study in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, college smokers taught this approach didn’t rate their urges as any weaker than a control group did, but they smoked significantly less over the following week. The shift that mattered wasn’t making the urge disappear. It was how they responded to it.

Habits like these often start as a stand-in for something else: quick relief from a stressful day, a small jolt of control when little else feels controllable. If a habit keeps showing up as your go-to way to manage hard feelings, our guide to emotional regulation goes deeper on that underlying pattern.

Ground yourself before you try to ride anything out

Before you try to outlast an urge, spend a minute somewhere calmer. Run a quick grounding check: name five things you can see, feel your feet on the floor, slow your exhale. Staying inside your window of tolerance, the zone where you’re alert but still thinking clearly, is what makes the rest of this workable instead of another thing you’re fighting. Skipping this step and trying to white-knuckle a strong urge straight on tends to backfire.

Go slow: one habit, one urge at a time

Pick one specific urge, not your whole list of habits you’d like to change. “The urge to check my phone during dinner” is workable; “fix all my habits” is not. Keep each round short, just a few minutes, and don’t expect one session to settle a pattern you’ve had for years.

Know your stop point

If distress rises above a 7 out of 10 and doesn’t settle, stop. Ground yourself, and consider working with a professional rather than pushing through alone. And if the urge involves a substance your body may depend on physically, alcohol, nicotine, opioids, or a prescription medication, talk with a doctor before trying to cut back or quit. Stopping some substances abruptly can be medically risky, no matter what technique you’re using alongside it.

A short bilateral stimulation practice for riding out an urge

With grounding and a stop point in place, here’s a short round of bilateral stimulation, the technique itself:

• Rate it. On a 0–10 scale, how strong is the urge right now? Note the number.
• Name it, without judgment. “Urge to check my phone.” “Craving for something sweet.” Just notice it, the way you’d notice weather.
• Add bilateral stimulation. Move your eyes smoothly left and right for 20 to 30 seconds, tap your knees or shoulders left-right (the “butterfly hug”), or use alternating left-right audio tones if you have headphones.
• Pause and breathe. Notice whatever shifted, a bit of distance, a slight easing, without forcing anything.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, checking in between each one.
• Re-rate. Check your 0–10 number again. If it’s easing, keep riding it out. If it climbs and won’t come back down, stop and ground yourself instead.

Timing rounds and watching a clock while a craving is loud is one more task than most people want mid-urge. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same left-right technique for you with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, paced however you like, in the web app. The beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation covers choosing a method and pace in more detail.

Does bilateral stimulation actually help with cravings?

There’s real evidence behind the mechanism, with an important caveat about who it’s been studied in. EMDR clinicians have used a structured protocol called DeTUR (Desensitization of Triggers and Urge Reprocessing) with cravings and compulsive behaviors since the early 1990s, developed by A.J. Popky, one of EMDR’s early contributors. A 2024 meta-analysis in Brain Sciences, pooling five studies and 266 participants with substance use disorders, found EMDR therapy produced a statistically significant reduction in craving compared with control conditions.

That evidence comes from trained clinicians working with people who have a diagnosed substance use disorder, not from people running a few minutes of self-guided BLS on a phone habit or a sugar craving. The everyday practice above borrows the same rhythmic left-right mechanism in a lower-stakes way: a plausible, low-risk tool for taking the edge off an urge in the moment, not a treatment for addiction.

When isn’t this enough?

This practice is built for everyday, situational urges and habits. It’s not the right tool alone if:

• A substance you use may involve physical dependency, like alcohol, nicotine, opioids, or a prescription medication. Never start, stop, or change a medication without your prescriber, and talk with a doctor before changing your use of any dependency-forming substance.
• The habit is disrupting your health, relationships, work, or finances in ways that feel bigger than a habit you’d like to break.
• During the practice above, distress climbs past a 7 out of 10 and won’t settle.
• The urge connects to thoughts of harming yourself. That’s outside what self-guided practice is built for. A licensed professional, or our crisis resources page, is the safer next step.

In any of these, working with a licensed therapist, ideally one trained in EMDR or addiction-focused care, is the safer path. If stress or burnout is what’s fueling the habit in the first place, our guide to stress and burnout looks at that underlying pressure directly.

You don’t have to white-knuckle every urge alone. Riding out the small ones, one at a time, is real practice for the moments that matter more.