Urge Surfing and If-Then Plans: Tools to Stop Impulsive Trades

After a Stop loss, many traders feel pressure to click into a new trade right away. That pressure is an urge. It builds fast, peaks, then fades on its own like a wave, if you don’t act on it. This article brings together four impulse-control tools from behavioural research: urge surfing, if-then plans, friction design and pre-commitment. Each one takes only minutes and is tied to real moments in a trading day.

How the urge to trade works

Impulsive clicks usually follow the same loop:

1. Trigger. A Stop loss hits, price runs without you, or you’ve stared at the chart long enough to get bored
2. Urge. Restlessness, a hand on the mouse, a voice saying “one more, win it back”
3. Action. An unplanned trade, a moved Stop loss, another position added to a loser
4. Relief. The discomfort disappears at once

Step 4 is the problem. Relief is a reward, so the brain learns “when it feels bad, click”. Next time the urge arrives sooner and stronger. Psychologists call this negative reinforcement: a behaviour gets stronger because it removes an unpleasant feeling, not because it works. A revenge trade may win or lose, but the loop gets reinforced every time you click.

The good news is that the loop can be broken. Between the urge and the action there is a gap of a few seconds to a few minutes. Every tool in this article works inside that gap.

Urge surfing: ride the wave instead of going under

Urge surfing comes from the relapse-prevention work of psychologist G. Alan Marlatt, and later became part of mindfulness-based relapse prevention programmes. The idea is simple. An urge behaves like a wave. If you neither fight it nor obey it, and only watch it, it rises to a peak and then falls by itself, the way a surfer stays on top of a wave without being dragged under.

The evidence is still small. Bowen and Marlatt (2009, Psychology of Addictive Behaviors) tested it with college students who smoked. The group given brief urge-surfing instructions did not report weaker urges, but they smoked fewer cigarettes over the following week. That point matters: the goal is not to stop wanting, it is to stop the wanting from ending in an action. The study was on smokers, not traders, so treat urge surfing as a sensible tool to try, not something proven to work for trading.

Urge surfing step by step (2–10 minutes)

Use it the moment you notice your hand wants to click, for example after a Stop loss or when price runs off without you.

1. Notice and name it. Say to yourself “this is the urge to win it back” or “this is boredom”. Naming it makes you the one watching the urge rather than the urge itself
2. Let go of the mouse and put your hands in your lap. Moving your hand away is already friction
3. Take 5–10 slow breaths, with the out-breath longer than the in-breath. Details in Breathing techniques for trading stress
4. Scan your body. Where is it? A tight chest, a clenched jaw, cold hands, a hot rush? Just look. Don’t fix it or push it away. It will shift by itself
5. Rate the urge from 0 to 10 at the start, then again every 2–3 minutes. Seeing the number drop on its own helps you trust that the wave really falls
6. Once the number is down, go back to your plan with one question: does this trade meet every condition I wrote down? If not, you’re done

Thai has a word for steps 1 and 4: sati (สติ), usually translated as mindfulness, meaning being aware that you want something without having to act on the wanting. To build that skill outside trading hours, read Mindfulness for traders.

An urge is not an order. It is a wave that rises and falls on its own. Your job is not to make it go away, only to keep your hand off the mouse while it is at the peak.

If-then plans: decide before the emotion arrives

Urge surfing works once the urge is already here. If-then plans work before it arrives. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer calls them implementation intentions (his 1999 review in American Psychologist). The format is:

“If [a clear situation], then I will [a small, specific action I can do right away].”

This differs from a general intention such as “I’ll be more disciplined” because it ties the action to a situation that is easy to recognise. When that situation happens, the action is called up almost automatically. You don’t have to make a fresh decision while you’re upset.

A meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006), pooling 94 independent tests, found that these plans help people reach their goals with a medium-to-large effect (d of about 0.65). The goals in those studies came from areas such as health and study. Nobody has tested them on trading directly, and real-life effects are usually smaller than lab results.

How to write one that actually works

• The situation must be easy to spot. “If I get stopped out” beats “if I feel bad”, because you know immediately that it has happened
• Say what you will do instead, not just “I won’t”. Some studies have found that “I will not…” plans work less well than plans that name a replacement behaviour
• Keep the action small enough to do while upset. “Walk for 10 minutes” is doable. “Review my whole system” is not, not in that moment
• Write it on paper and stick it next to the screen, rather than keeping it in your head

If-then plans for common urges

If… (situation)	The urge that usually follows	Then I will…
I get stopped out	Jump straight into a new trade to win it back	Close the order window, leave the desk for 10 minutes, and log the trade before I look at a chart again
Price gets close to my Stop loss	Drag the Stop loss further away	Put my hands in my lap, take 5 breaths, and let the Stop loss do the job I set it for when I opened the trade
A trade is in loss and price keeps going against me	Add to the same side to average the price	Check that total risk is still what I planned. If adding was not in the plan from the start, I don’t add
I’ve watched the chart for 30 minutes with no setup	Open a trade out of boredom	Set an alert at the price level I’m waiting for, then close the platform
Price has already run without me	Chase it in mid-move	Write down why I missed it and wait for the next setup. No trade without a clear Stop loss level
I’ve won several in a row	Raise the lot because I feel sure	Use the same size from the calculator. Size only changes at my weekly review

Adding to a loser is the most expensive urge in the table, because it raises risk exactly when you are wrong. The numbers are in Grid and martingale. Chasing price is covered in FOMO and chasing entries.

Friction: make the wrong path harder

Rather than relying on willpower alone, set up your environment so an impulsive click takes several steps, while following the plan takes as few as possible. Every extra step buys a few more seconds for the wave to fall.

• Turn off One Click Trading. In MT5 it is under Tools → Options → Trade. Every order then has to go through the order window
• Use alerts instead of watching. Set an alert at the price you care about, then leave the screen. Watching the chart for hours means being exposed to triggers the whole time. This links to how often you check, see Checking frequency and loss aversion
• Place pending orders while calm. Put the Stop loss and Take profit in at planning time and let the platform do the rest. See Order types explained
• Close the platform and log out of the phone app when your trading window ends. The phone app is the shortest path an urge can take
• Leave your phone in another room when you’re sleeping or with family
• Use a checklist before clicking. A sheet of six items you must tick before opening a trade, see Pre-trade routine and checklist
• A 10-minute wait rule for unplanned trades. If you want a trade that isn’t on your written list of setups, set a 10-minute timer first and urge surf during it

Watch the other side, though. Friction belongs on unplanned trades only. If you start waiting, hesitating or skipping trades that meet your plan, that is a different problem with a real cost. Read Hesitation and skipping trades.

Pre-commitment: the Ulysses approach

In the Greek epic, Ulysses (Odysseus) wanted to hear the Sirens, whose song lured sailors onto the rocks. So he had his crew plug their ears with wax and tie him to the mast, with orders not to untie him however much he begged. He knew his future self would choose badly, so he made the choice in advance.

Behavioural economists, Richard Thaler among them, call this kind of thing a commitment device: locking in your future options while you are still thinking clearly. In trading it looks like this:

• A daily loss limit the platform enforces. Use a tool that closes all trades when the day’s loss reaches a set amount. How to choose the numbers is in Revenge trading and daily loss limits
• Fixed trading hours, for example only 20:00–23:00 Thai time (UTC+7), with the platform closed outside them
• Written rules that can only change on review day, never during a trading session. See Writing your trading plan as rules
• Keep only the money you’re willing to risk in the trading account. The rest stays in another account, so topping up takes time and several steps
• Tell someone your rules, a trading friend or someone at home, and send them a summary every week, including any trades that broke the rules

Make the hard decisions while calm, then lock them in. The version of you who just got stopped out should not be deciding alone.

Worked example: how much a 10-minute wait rule can matter

Every number here is made up to show the mechanism. It is not a result you should expect. Suppose a trader, in one month:

• Takes 30 planned trades with an expectancy after costs of +0.10R each (R is the money lost when one trade hits its Stop loss)
• Takes 10 impulsive trades with an expectancy of −0.30R each (assumed worse, since they have no setup and often come after price has already run)
• Uses a 10-minute wait rule that cancels Z% of the impulsive trades and leaves planned trades alone

Step by step: the planned trades give 30 × 0.10 = +3.0R. With no rule, the impulsive trades give 10 × (−0.30) = −3.0R. The month nets 0R. A whole month of work, and ten impulsive trades eat the entire edge.

Impulsive trades the rule cancels	Impulsive trades left	Result from impulsive trades	Month total
0%	10	−3.00R	0.00R
25%	7.5	−2.25R	+0.75R
50%	5	−1.50R	+1.50R
75%	2.5	−0.75R	+2.25R
100%	0	0.00R	+3.00R

If 1R = 10 dollars, the month totals are 0, 7.50, 15, 22.50 and 30 dollars. Everything depends on the assumptions. If the real system has no edge, cancelling impulsive trades only reduces losses. It doesn’t create a profit.

Putting it into one trading day

• Before the session: read the if-then sheet next to your screen once, set today’s loss limit, and set alerts at the levels you’re waiting for
• During the session: whenever your hand wants an unplanned trade, start a 10-minute timer and urge surf
• After a Stop loss: follow the first row of the table and leave the desk before you look at a chart again
• End of day: note in your journal how many urges you had, how many you acted on, and roughly how many minutes each wave lasted. One extra column in the trading journal template is enough

After a few weeks the journal will show you what your triggers are, which hours are risky, and which if-then rules need rewriting.

When to get help

These tools help with everyday discipline. They are not treatment. If you repeatedly can’t stop yourself, trade with money you shouldn’t lose, borrow to win losses back, hide it from the people you live with, or lose sleep and stay highly stressed for long stretches, those signs can be close to a gambling problem. Talk to a mental health professional. Help lines exist; in Thailand you can call the Department of Mental Health hotline on 1323. More warning signs in Burnout and gambling warning signs.

Common mistakes

• Trying not to feel the urge. Urges will keep coming. The aim is not to act while one is at its peak. Suppressing it by getting angry at yourself often makes it stronger
• Writing if-then plans that are too vague. “If I feel bad, I’ll be disciplined” has no situation you can spot and no action you can do right away
• Applying the wait rule to planned trades. Friction that also blocks your plan turns overtrading into skipped trades
• Waiting 10 minutes while staring at the chart. A wait works when you leave the trigger and get up from the desk, not when you count down in front of the screen
• Changing the rules mid-session because “the market looks good today”. A commitment you can change at any time is not a commitment
• Expecting it to work after one try. Each time you let a wave pass without clicking, the old loop gets a little weaker. It’s training, not a switch