Urge Surfing with Bilateral Stimulation: Ride It Out

Urge surfing is a mindfulness technique for riding out a craving instead of fighting it or giving in: name the urge, notice where it shows up in your body, and watch it build, peak, and fade like a wave. A few rounds of bilateral stimulation (BLS), the technique behind EMDR, can help you stay steady while it passes.

You feel it before you’ve decided anything: the reach for a cigarette, the pull toward the fridge, the itch to open an app you swore you’d quit. It rises fast, feels urgent, and makes acting on it seem like the only way to make it stop. Riding it out on purpose, instead of white-knuckling it or giving in, works with how urges actually behave instead of against them.

What is the urge surfing technique, and where does it come from?

Psychologist G. Alan Marlatt coined “urge surfing” while building a relapse-prevention model at the University of Washington’s Addictive Behaviors Research Center. A 1999 overview in Alcohol Research and Health, co-authored by Marlatt, describes teaching people to label the sensations and thoughts of a craving as “an urge,” then meet it with detachment instead of struggle, picturing it as a wave a surfer rides rather than fights. The VA’s Center of Excellence for Substance Use Disorders Treatment still teaches the same core skill today: sit somewhere steady, scan your body for where the urge lives, and describe the sensation itself, hot, tight, buzzing, heavy, rather than the story wrapped around it.

The wave part matters. An urge you don’t feed builds, crests, and breaks into foam whether you act on it or not. The technique’s job isn’t to make the wave never arrive. It’s to help you stay on the board while it passes under you.

Start from steady ground, not mid-wave

Before you try to observe an urge calmly, make sure you’re calm enough to observe anything. Take a few slower breaths, feel your feet on the floor, run a quick grounding check. Staying inside your window of tolerance, alert but not overwhelmed, is what makes it possible to watch a wave instead of getting pulled under by it. Trying to urge surf from full-blown panic isn’t surfing. It’s just getting pulled under.

Go slow: one urge, not your whole list

Pick a single, specific urge, not every habit you’d like to change at once. “The urge to check my phone right now” is workable. “Fix my relationship with food” is not, at least not in one sitting. Keep each round short, a few minutes at most, and expect to practice this many times before it feels close to automatic.

Know your stop point

If your distress climbs above a 7 out of 10 and won’t come back down, stop. Ground yourself, and consider working with a professional rather than pushing through alone. If the urge is tied to a substance your body may be physically dependent on, alcohol, nicotine, opioids, or a prescription medication, talk with a doctor before you try to cut back or stop. Never start, stop, or change a medication without your prescriber. Withdrawal from some substances is medically risky no matter which technique you’re using alongside it.

How do you combine urge surfing with bilateral stimulation?

With grounding and a stop point in place, here’s how to layer a few rounds of bilateral stimulation onto the classic technique:

• Get steady. Sit down, feet flat on the floor. Take three slow breaths.
• Rate it. On a 0–10 scale, how strong is the urge right now?
• Locate it. Scan your body. Chest, stomach, hands, jaw? Describe the sensation itself, tight, hot, buzzing, hollow, without the story attached to it.
• Picture the wave. It’s building. It hasn’t crested yet. It will.
• 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. Let your breath be the board you’re standing on while the wave moves.
• Pause and re-scan. What shifted in the sensation? Even a small change counts.
• Repeat 3 to 5 short rounds, riding the wave as it crests and breaks, checking your 0–10 number between rounds.
• Stop if it climbs instead of easing. Ground yourself and try again later, or use the stop-point guidance above.

Watching a clock and counting rounds while an urge is loud is one more task than most people want to hold. EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, runs the same left-right technique for you with a moving on-screen target or alternating tones, at whatever pace you set, in the web app. The beginner’s guide to self-guided bilateral stimulation covers choosing a method in more detail.

Does adding bilateral stimulation actually help, or is urge surfing enough alone?

Plain mindfulness has real support on its own. In a 2009 study in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, college smokers given a brief urge-surfing-style mindfulness instruction didn’t rate their urges as any weaker than a control group did. But they changed how they responded to those urges and smoked significantly less over the following week. Riding it out, not making the urge disappear, was what changed.

Bilateral stimulation has its own track record with cravings specifically. Since the early 1990s, EMDR clinicians have used a structured protocol called DeTUR (Desensitization of Triggers and Urge Reprocessing) to work directly with triggers and the urge to use, 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.

The honest caveat: that evidence comes from trained clinicians working with people who have a diagnosed substance use disorder, not from someone running a few minutes of self-guided BLS on a phone habit or a sugar craving. Combining the two techniques above is a plausible, low-risk way to stay regulated while you ride out an everyday urge, not a proven addiction treatment.

When is self-guided urge surfing not enough?

This practice fits everyday, situational urges. It’s probably not enough on its own if:

• A substance you use may involve physical dependency, like alcohol, nicotine, opioids, or a prescription medication. Talk with a doctor before changing your use, and never adjust a medication without your prescriber.
• The urge is disrupting your health, relationships, work, or finances in ways that go beyond an everyday habit.
• Distress climbs past a 7 out of 10 during the practice above 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 those, a licensed therapist, ideally one trained in EMDR or addiction-focused care, is the safer path. If a specific urge, like emotional eating, keeps showing up as your go-to way to cope, or you want the wider picture, our hub on habits and urges covers that pattern in more depth.

You don’t have to catch every wave perfectly. Riding out one urge, one time, is real practice, and it counts even when it’s messy.