The research behind Interrupt.

In the 1980s, addiction researcher Alan Marlatt noticed that relapse patients trying to suppress cravings tended to lose — the harder they fought, the larger the urge seemed to grow. He flipped the instruction: instead of fighting the wave, observe it. Patients learned to track the rise, the peak, and the fall of an urge as it moved through them. The technique became known as urge surfing, and it became one of the most replicated findings in relapse prevention.

The clinical literature converges on a rough shape: an unaided urge typically peaks and starts to decline within 20–30 minutes when observed rather than suppressed. The exact curve varies by substance, individual, and context — but the core finding holds. A craving is not a permanent state; it's a wave with an ending built in.

"Urges and cravings are conditioned responses… Like waves, they rise, peak, and subside. The skill is in surfing, not fighting." — Alan Marlatt, Relapse Prevention (1985)

A 2009 randomized trial by Bowen and Marlatt tested urge surfing in smokers and found that participants taught the technique smoked significantly less in follow-up than controls — even though they reported feeling cravings just as strongly. The intervention didn't make the wave smaller. It changed what the patients did inside it.

There is no "60-second rule" in the addiction literature. We want to be upfront about that. What there is — and this is what Interrupt is built on — is a body of evidence showing that short delays in the 30–120 second range are sufficient to interrupt an urge's grip across several distinct mechanisms. Sixty seconds sits in the middle of that range, and we picked it because it's the longest pause most people will actually take when a real urge hits.

Here's what that minute is doing, in parallel:

1. Urge decay onset. Cravings rise fast, peak, and decay (Marlatt's urge surfing model). The decay typically starts within 30–180 seconds if the behavior isn't reinforced. A 60-second pause sits past the initial spike but inside the early-decay window — the moment when the urge is most interruptible.

2. Attentional disengagement. Sustained attention to a trigger requires ongoing reinforcement. Pulling attention away for ~30–90 seconds is enough to reduce stimulus salience and allow attentional reallocation. After 60 seconds with the timer ring, the trigger has lost dominance.

3. Delay discounting. Behavioral economics research consistently shows that even short delays — as small as 30–120 seconds — significantly reduce impulsive choice. Adding a minute of structured pause lowers the perceived immediacy of the reward, which weakens the urge's pull.

4. Cognitive control re-engagement. Prefrontal control systems are slower than the automatic systems that fire on a trigger. They need a beat to come fully online. Sixty seconds gives the prefrontal cortex enough time to stabilize a competing intention rather than just briefly flash and lose.

5. Paced breathing (a bonus mechanism, not the whole story). Within the 60-second window, Interrupt paces you at ~6 breaths per minute — the resonance-frequency range studied by Lehrer and Vaschillo. Slow breathing at this cadence aligns with the body's baroreflex, produces maximum heart rate variability, and engages the parasympathetic nervous system. This isn't the whole reason 60 seconds works, but it's one of the cleanest add-ons.

The honest summary: 60 seconds is a practical sweet spot, not a magic number. It's long enough to cross the urge peak without reinforcement, short enough that people actually comply. The effectiveness isn't about the exact length — it's about crossing the peak without acting on it. Sixty seconds happens to be where compliance and mechanism converge.

The single most damaging finding in the relapse prevention literature is the abstinence violation effect (AVE): when someone breaks an abstinence streak, the shame and self-blame that follow are themselves predictors of further relapse. The first slip isn't usually what causes the spiral — the response to the slip is.

Streak counters, "you broke your X-day record" notifications, and shame-flavored re-engagement nudges are AVE machines. They turn a single moment into an identity verdict.

The product design that helps recovery is the opposite: each session is its own session, every urge is its own urge, and a hard moment yesterday has no bearing on the one you're navigating now.

This is why Interrupt has no streaks, no daily reminders, and no leaderboards. We don't gamify your relapse, because relapse isn't a game with a score — and treating it that way actively makes recovery harder.

Interrupt is new. We don't have peer-reviewed data on the app itself, and we won't fabricate it.

Once we have a meaningful sample of opt-in, anonymized session data, we'll publish:

• Average urge-intensity drop within a single session
• Self-reported "passed / reduced / not yet" rates over 30 days
• Breakdown by trigger type and time of day

Until then: the science we cite is third-party. The mechanism is real. Numbers about Interrupt specifically will appear here when they exist — and not before.