Urge Surfing Worksheet
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Looking for an urge surfing worksheet to share with therapy clients? The urge surfing PDF in this article is a useful tool to help clients build distress tolerance and navigate challenging situations.
Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) is one of many therapeutic modalities that a mental health therapist may practice with clients. DBT provides a helpful framework to teach distress tolerance, mindfulness, and emotional regulation skills.
This article includes information on the urge surfing skill and benefits of using an urge surfing worksheet, along with urge surfing examples and a free downloadable urge surfing PDF to save to your electronic health record (EHR) for repeated use.
What is urge surfing?
Urge surfing is a DBT skill that helps clients build distress tolerance.
The four core skills that form the foundation of dialectical behavioral therapy include:
- Distress tolerance
- Mindfulness
- Emotion regulation skills
- Interpersonal effectiveness
Distress tolerance skills help individuals navigate challenging situations and feelings without turning to unhelpful strategies, like avoidance, alcohol, or panic.
As the name suggests, urge surfing is a technique used to ride the wave of an intense emotion, unwanted behavior, or impulse—without panicking or experiencing other forms of distress like “blowing up” or “melting down.”
Unwanted urges rarely last for longer than 30 minutes when practicing the urge surfing technique. When using an urge surfing technique, we also learn that it’s important not to “feed” the urge by making a plan, trying to suppress it, ruminating on it, engaging in justification, or using other unhelpful behaviors as distractions.
Urge surfing examples
There are various urge surfing techniques, but the core skill involves riding out the urge as it builds in intensity and eventually fades away. With practice, urges can subside in around 30 minutes or less.
Urge surfing can be used in many different situations, such as:
- Staying sober
- Maintaining healthy eating habits
- To avoid lashing out
- To reduce overspending
Another situation in which urge surfing can be helpful is in trying to stop smoking. Nicotine is highly addictive both physically and psychologically, making it incredibly difficult to stop smoking. Urge surfing the impulse to smoke, however, may allow a person to control the impulse until it passes.
Benefits of using the urge surfing DBT skill
There are many benefits to urge surfing, including:
- Increased resilience to certain impulses and cravings
- Weakens urges over time
- Strengthens distress tolerance skills and the ability to handle difficult emotions
- Helps to maintain sobriety and smoking cessation, reducing the risk of relapse
- Urge surfing can help with impulse control and outbursts, positively impacting relationships
How to use the urge surfing worksheet
Here are the key steps to urge surfing, which are included in the urge surfing worksheet:
- Acknowledge the urge without trying to avoid or suppress your thoughts.
- Mindfully observe the body and pay attention to the bodily sensations associated with the urge, such as the location of the feeling, if there is a texture to the sensation, whether the sensation has a temperature, the shape of the feeling, and whether it is static or moves. Does it have a border or are the edges faded like a fuzzy toy? Does the sensation change in intensity then slowly dissipate?
- You may want to visualize a wave instead of noticing body sensations. As the urge heightens in intensity, imagine a wave rising to form a crest and then crashing down, then slowly fading into the sand.
- While observing your body or visualization, notice your breathing. Has it slowed or deepened?
- When your mind becomes distracted, try not to criticize or judge yourself. Just bring your attention back to the sensations or visualization and your breath.
- After 5 to 10 minutes of urge surfing, check in with the urge. Maybe it has passed or is less intense. You might want to repeat the process until the urge has completely disappeared or when you feel comfortable moving on.
You can download the free urge surfing PDF to use in various ways: with clients in session to illustrate the skill, as an urge surfing handout to practice the skill at home, or as an urge surfing script to teach the practice in a virtual therapy session.
You can also save the urge surfing worksheet to your electronic health record (EHR) to easily download and use in future sessions with clients.
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