Smokers taught to ride out urges smoked less

The study, from the University of Washington's Addictive Behaviors Research Center, involved 123 undergraduate smokers who wanted to change their smoking but were not in a quit programme. Each took part in a cue-exposure task designed to bring on the urge to smoke.

They were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One received brief mindfulness-based instructions built on “urge surfing,” a technique from Marlatt's 1985 work with Gordon. The other received no instructions.

The two groups “did not differ significantly on measures of urges.” But over a seven-day follow-up, the group given the instructions smoked significantly fewer cigarettes. The authors concluded that the techniques “may not initially reduce urges to smoke but may change the response to urges,” and described their data as preliminary. The study was published in Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

A review by Stuart Ferguson and Saul Shiffman, also from 2009, looked at urges set off by cues. It describes them as “intense, episodic cravings typically provoked by situational cues associated with drug use.” Field studies, the review reports, show that such cravings are “substantially responsible for relapse to smoking” but that “smoking can often be averted by coping responses.”

Neither paper puts a number of minutes on a single urge. iCanQuit, a quit-smoking service run by the Cancer Institute NSW, part of the New South Wales Government, tells smokers: “Each craving usually lasts only 10 to 20 minutes.”