1252: How To Ride The Wave Of Anxiety Instead Of Fighting It With Urge Surfing

In today's episode, Gina discusses urge surfing as a technique for relating to our stress and anxiety differently, interpreting such signals less like immediate emergencies and more like fleeting, temporary conditions. Urges like overthinking, checking, and scrolling are included. We can use urge surfing to observe these often powerful urges, rather then simply reacting to them. Listen in and learn how to use urge surfing to your immediate benefit and give yourself more space and grace.
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Quote:
You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn
Chapters
0:26 Urge Surfing Explained
4:33 How Urge Surfing Works
9:58 Practicing the Surf
16:34 Start Small, Stay Steady
Summary
In this episode, we discuss urge surfing as a mindfulness-based way to relate differently to anxiety, stress, and uncomfortable emotions. We focus on how this practice can help us stop treating every anxious feeling like an emergency and instead notice it as something temporary.
We talk about the common urges that come with anxiety, such as overthinking, checking, reassurance-seeking, scrolling, avoiding, and trying to escape discomfort. We emphasize that an urge is not the same as an emergency, and that we do not have to act on every impulse the mind produces.
We explain urge surfing by comparing emotions and urges to ocean waves that rise, peak, and fall. We note that much of the suffering comes not only from the feeling itself, but from resisting it, fearing it, or creating a story around it. Urge surfing teaches us to observe instead of reacting immediately.
We also describe how to practice it in daily life: pause, notice the urge, identify where it shows up in the body, use simple words for the sensations, and breathe while allowing the wave to move through. We mention that even short pauses and small moments of awareness can help retrain the nervous system and build self-trust.
We close by encouraging a gentle, gradual approach, especially when the practice feels difficult at first. We remind listeners that healing often happens through repeated small steps, and that we can learn to stay with discomfort instead of automatically fleeing it.
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