Stand up and leave the room you are in. Set a timer for ten minutes and tell yourself you are only delaying, not refusing. Do something physical with your hands and something that changes your breathing. Message one person the word you agreed with them. Then reassess at ten minutes, and if it is still there, do another ten.
That works whether the pull is toward a screen, a shop, a bottle, a person's number or something with no name at all.
Why the routine is not about the thing you want
Every craving article you have read was written for one substance or one behaviour, which is unhelpful if yours is not on the list. But the useful part of the routine never was about the substance. It is about the fact that the urge is time-limited, physical, and heavily attached to your current surroundings.
Three facts do the work.
**Cravings are cued by where you are.** The US National Institute on Drug Abuse describes it directly: cues in a person's daily routine or environment linked with the behaviour "can trigger uncontrollable cravings whenever the person is exposed to these cues, even if the drug itself is not available". Change the cue and you have changed part of the input.
**Wanting and liking are not the same system.** NIDA notes that scientists now think dopamine "has more to do with getting us to repeat pleasurable activities (reinforcement) than with producing pleasure directly". If your thing stopped being enjoyable a while ago and still pulls hard, that is expected rather than evidence you are broken.
**Self-control is exactly what gets worn down.** NIDA calls impaired self-control "the hallmark of addiction". So a plan that requires more willpower at the peak is a plan built on the one resource that is already depleted. A routine is better than resolve because you do not have to decide anything while it runs.
One honest caveat. All of that was studied in substance use. Applying it to checking, buying, scrolling, picking or anything else is an extension the research has not settled, and researchers have [warned against treating every strong habit as an addiction](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4627665/). Cue reactivity as a general learning mechanism is uncontroversial. A confident brain story about your specific behaviour is not.
The ten minutes
Do them in this order. The order matters, because the early steps are the ones you can still manage when the pull is loud.
Move
Leave the room. Not a symbolic gesture, an actual different room, or outside if that is available. The room you are in contains the chair, the screen, the light and the time of night that your body has learned to associate with the behaviour. Standing up interrupts a surprising amount of that.
If leaving is not possible, change the room instead. Lights on, curtains open, window open, different chair, cold water on your face.
Delay, do not refuse
Say the delay out loud if you can: "Not now. Ten minutes." Refusing outright starts an argument you have to win repeatedly. Delaying starts a clock, and you are much better at waiting than at winning arguments with yourself.
Set an actual timer. An unmeasured ten minutes is not ten minutes.
Change the body
Cravings are physical and respond to physical input. Pick one, not a menu:
- Cold water on the wrists and face, or a cold shower if the pull is severe
- Sixty seconds of something that makes you breathe hard: stairs, press-ups, a fast walk to the end of the road
- Slow breathing with a long out-breath, counting, for two minutes
- Something in your hands that needs attention: washing up, cooking, a puzzle, folding
Anything involving your hands is worth more than anything involving only your thoughts, because the behaviour usually involves your hands too.
Tell one person
Agree a word with someone beforehand so you never have to explain in the moment. Send it. They do not have to fix anything or reply with the right thing. The point is that the episode is no longer happening entirely in private, and secrecy is a large part of what makes an urge feel unstoppable.
If there is nobody, the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, at any hour, and they take calls about anything at all.
Reassess, then repeat
At ten minutes, check. Most people find it has dropped, sometimes a lot. If it is still there, do another ten. Nobody has ever needed to get through the rest of their life during those ten minutes, only the ten minutes.
Set it up before you need it
The routine fails when it is invented at the moment of the urge. Spend fifteen minutes now, while you are calm, on four things:
- **The room you will move to.** Decide it. "Somewhere else" becomes "nowhere" at 11pm.
- **Your physical move.** One, chosen, not a list to pick from.
- **The person and the word.** Ask them today. Most people say yes and are glad to be asked.
- **The friction that buys you the ten minutes.** Log out, delete the app, move the object, hand over the card. [Friction, the one move that works for everything](/guides/other/friction-the-one-move-that-works-for-everything) is the fuller version, and it is what makes a ten-minute delay physically possible rather than theoretical.
Write the four on a card or a note on your phone. During an urge, reading a plan is much easier than making one.
What not to do
**Do not sit still and wait it out in the same chair.** Willpower in the original setting is the hardest version of this, and there is no prize for doing it the hard way.
**Do not go looking for information about it.** Reading about the thing, checking the price, opening the app "just to look", scrolling for the person's name. That is the behaviour in a respectable coat and it usually ends the way you expect.
**Do not bargain about size.** One episode, a small amount, five minutes only. The bargain is what the pull produces when direct pressure stops working, and it comes with a plan you would not accept at any other hour.
**Do not treat a difficult ten minutes as evidence you cannot do this.** Difficult is what it is supposed to be. Getting through it while it is difficult is the entire skill.
If the urges are constant rather than occasional
A routine handles episodes. If the pull is more or less continuous, or arriving many times a day, the useful work is upstream: finding the cues and removing them, which is [writing your own trigger map](/guides/other/writing-your-own-trigger-map).
Two other things worth knowing. Urges are usually worse when you are tired, hungry or alone late at night, so the boring fixes matter more than they sound. And if what fires the urge is distress rather than opportunity, this routine will hold the moment but not the pattern, and that is a good reason to talk to a GP or to get to a meeting.
SMART Recovery UK runs free meetings grounded in cognitive behavioural therapy, covering problem behaviours generally rather than one substance, on 0330 053 6022.
One safety note, because this stream covers everything. If your behaviour involves alcohol or a prescribed medicine you have become dependent on, do not stop suddenly on your own. The NHS is explicit that "It can be very dangerous to stop drinking suddenly if you're dependent on alcohol", and NICE guidance on prescribed medicines says: "Do not stop a medicine abruptly." Talk to a GP first. A craving routine is for getting through an hour, not for managing a withdrawal that needs a prescriber.
Common questions
How long does a craving last?
Longer than a minute and much shorter than it feels, and it varies enough that a specific number would be made up. What people consistently describe is a rise, a peak and a fall rather than a climb that continues forever. Ten-minute blocks work because you are measuring against the peak rather than against the whole evening.
Does distraction actually work, or am I just postponing it?
Both, and postponing is the point. You are not trying to eliminate the urge, you are trying to be somewhere else when it peaks. Do that often enough and the urge gets a weaker association with the moment, though that takes months rather than nights.
What if it comes straight back afterwards?
Then run the routine again. Some evenings are several rounds, particularly early on and particularly when you are tired. Getting through four rounds is not four failures, it is four times the behaviour did not happen.
Why do I still want it when I do not even enjoy it any more?
Because wanting and liking come apart. NIDA describes dopamine as being more about repeating an activity than about producing pleasure directly, so a strong pull toward something you no longer enjoy is a known pattern rather than a sign something is wrong with you specifically.
Sources
- [NIDA, Drugs and the Brain](https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/drugs-brain). Cue-triggered cravings, the persistence of the learned response, and dopamine as reinforcement rather than pleasure.
- [NIDA, Drug Misuse and Addiction](https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/drug-misuse-addiction). Impaired self-control described as the hallmark of addiction.
- [NHS, Alcohol support](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-advice/alcohol-support/). That stopping suddenly can be very dangerous for someone dependent on alcohol.
- [NICE NG215, Medicines associated with dependence or withdrawal symptoms](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK580680/). The recommendation not to stop a medicine abruptly.
