Surfing and Addiction
“Between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is the power of choice. The trouble is that space feels invisible”.
Psychologist G. Alan Marlatt spent his career prying open the gap. He led the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington and built a program called Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention. Strip away the clinical name and the core remains: Cravings are inevitable in the road to recovery, but how one acknowledges their arrival and departure can make all the difference.
Surf’s Up
Like the ocean waves, an urge isn’t linear. The urge builds, crests - and if left alone - wanes away. Instead of bracing for each and every urge, start paddling through the current. Marlatt coins the term “urge surfing”
What struck me is that the enemy usually isn’t the craving. It’s the underlying want and shame from failure to conquer the cravings and welcomes more failure. The shame acts as an accelerant for whatever emotional state feeds the cravings.
The Second Arrow
Buddhism has a term for this - “the second arrow” - suffering on top of suffering. Marlatt observed the same patterns in various treatment rooms. Most relapses aren’t just driven by physical need but by an extreme emotion or trauma looking for an off-ramp.
One of his clients pictured her craving as a pig and started talking to it. What she found underneath wasn’t a need for the drug at all…
It was loneliness. The pig brought her face to face with extreme feelings of grief, isolation and self-abandonment.
So What Now?
An acronym: S.O.B.E.R.
(Safely) Stop where you’re at
Observe what’s happening in your body
Focus on your Breath
Expand your thoughts forward to the consequences
Respond instead of react
The mechanism is the same for a compulsion, a doomscroll, or an intrusive thought. The urge says now. The practice says watch it, breathe, don’t abandon the current.
Each time you’re proving to yourself the gap is real — that there’s a space in there, and you get to choose what happens in it.
“My thoughts don’t always need to dictate what I do”
Adapted from an Inquiring Mind interview with G. Alan Marlatt.