Breathing Through Urges

We created this breathing tool to help people with drinking, drug use, and other unhelpful urges and actions. Finding new ways to handle your urges and overwhelming feelings can help you get through the moment without using.

Using paced breathing with positive self talk is one way to get through these experiences. In this tool, we are going to guide you through practicing these skills by using a brief animation.

We expect this activity to take about 5 minutes.

Before we begin, please answer these optional questions about your experience. Your responses will help us understand how this tool impacts you so we can improve it:

For this paced breathing exercise, a 2 minute animation will help guide you through how to learn deep breathing.

Now let’s begin!

In the animation below, let the bar at the bottom guide the rate of breathing in and out.

• When breathing in, breathe so deeply that your stomach expands outward.
• When you breathe out, release the air slowly through your mouth.
• Continue with this until the video ends.

When you’re done watching the video, you can move on to the next page.

Great! We’re so glad you think using this again would help you. Let’s work on making it easy to find in the future so you can access it when you need it.