Mike Hardenbrook
speaker
3,502 appearances
21 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 13 Aug
Mike Hardenbrook’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 21 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 9.
Appearances
But fighting has its own problems.
voice-verified
When you're fighting a craving, you tighten around it.
voice-verified
You start monitoring yourself.
voice-verified
Is it gone yet?
voice-verified
Why am I still thinking about this?
voice-verified
And when that happens, you don't just have the urge.
voice-verified
You have the urge plus the stress about the urge.
voice-verified
And if stress is part of what triggered the craving in the first place, you might have just made it worse.
voice-verified
And there's research showing that trying to suppress thoughts about drinking can actually increase the preoccupation with it.
voice-verified
The harder you say, I don't want to think about it, the more mental bandwidth it ends up taking up.
voice-verified
So fighting it backfires and giving in keeps the pattern going, there's actually a third option.
voice-verified
You watch it.
voice-verified
Urge Surfing comes out of the work of a psychologist, Alan Marlat, who worked alongside Andrew Titarsky, who I've had on the show many times, a pioneer on harm reduction, and Marlat basically rebuilt the way clinicians think about relapse.
voice-verified
Marlat instead looked at the actual process around it, the triggers, the high-risk moments.
voice-verified
The thoughts that show up, and what happens after that first drink.
voice-verified
He identified something he called abstinence violation effect.
voice-verified
Someone trying to cut back has an unplanned drink, tells themselves they already blew it, and then the whole night goes sideways.
voice-verified
One thought turns one drink into three.
voice-verified
And that spiral is what Marlat was trying to interrupt.
voice-verified
And urge surfing was one of the tools built for that gap between the urge and action.
voice-verified
Showing 3021–3040 of 3,502 · page 152 of 176
← Previous
Next →