DaybookIn the hard minute
How do I stop a porn urge right now?
You do not have to fight it, and you do not have to give in. An urge is a wave: it rises, peaks and passes. Right now your only job is to outlast this one, and a few simple steps make the next ten minutes easier.
Right now, in this order
- Name it. Say to yourself, “This is an urge. It is a wave.” Naming it puts a small gap between the urge and what you do next.
- Breathe out slowly. Breathe in through your nose, sip in a little more air, then breathe out through your mouth, longer than the breath in. Keep going for about a minute.
- Move. Stand up and walk to another room, or do ten push-ups or squats. Move first, then decide.
- Come back to the room. Name 5 things you can see, 4 you can feel, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell and 1 you can taste. A sip of water counts.
- Give it ten minutes. Then notice what the urge did. Ten minutes is not a magic number. It is short enough to try.
Why this works
Psychologist Alan Marlatt called this urge surfing: notice the urge, breathe, and watch it rise and fall. College smokers who learned it had urges just as strong as everyone else’s, but over the next week they smoked fewer cigarettes. The urge did not shrink. What they did with it changed. That gap between the urge and the action is the skill, and it grows every time you use it.
An urge also runs on a picture in your head, and that picture uses the same space in your mind as real seeing and feeling. Give your eyes and hands something real, and the picture has less room. In a week-long study, three minutes of a block game after each craving lowered cravings, sexual urges among them, by about 14 points out of 100, and it kept working all week.
Your body helps too. A review of studies on cigarette cravings found strong evidence that a short bout of exercise eases a craving for a while. And a slow breath with a long breath out takes a minute, costs nothing, and settles the body while the wave passes.
One thing to do tonight
Practice the long breath out once tonight, while it is quiet: in through the nose, a little more air, then a long, slow breath out. One minute. When the next urge comes, you will know exactly where to find it.
How Daybook helps
Daybook puts an SOS button on Today, free and with no account. It opens with a slow breath, then offers a tool that fits the moment: 5-4-3-2-1 to come back to the room, Fit the shapes to crowd out the picture, The hour after to play it forward, a ten-minute pause, moving, your own words, or a ready text to someone you trust. Every urge you ride out goes in your log, as proof of who you are becoming.
Daybook is free, with no ads and no tracking, and it works with no account.
More questions
Where this comes from
These answers come from Daybook’s lessons, which are built on this research:
- Bowen & Marlatt (2009): “Surfing the urge,” a study with college smokers
- Skorka-Brown, Andrade, Whalley & May (2015): a block game lowers cravings in daily life, Addictive Behaviors
- Kemps & Tiggemann (2007): picturing a scene or a smell turns food cravings down, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
- Haasova et al. (2013): physical activity and cigarette cravings, a systematic review, Addiction
- Balban et al. (2023): brief breathing practices and mood, a randomized study, Cell Reports Medicine