Every urge rises, peaks, and passes.
Crest is somewhere to wait it out. Most people give in during the rise, and never find out the wave was already about to break.
Scroll to ride it
The Rise · 0–8 min
The urge is building. This is the part people lose.
An urge feels like it will keep climbing forever, so giving in feels like the only way to make it stop. It isn't. It's a wave with a top, and the top is closer than it feels.
Open Crest, pick what you're riding out, and start. That's the whole interaction — one tap, because the moment an urge hits is the worst possible time to make someone navigate an app.
A live demonstration of Crest's surf screen. As you scroll, a timer counts up and the phase moves through The Rise, The Crest, The Fall and Calm Waters, with the wave behind it changing shape and colour to match.
The Crest · 8–15 min
The peak lasts minutes, not hours.
Urge surfing is a technique from DBT, used in addiction therapy for decades. You don't fight the urge and you don't distract yourself from it. You watch it, the way you'd watch weather, until it changes.
Crest shows you where you are in it. The wave rises, the colour shifts, the phase changes — so the thing you're waiting on stops being abstract and starts being something you can see the end of.
Eight ways through
Something to do with the minutes.
Waiting is easier with your hands busy. Every tool is one tap from the surf screen, and none of them take you out of it.
- Breathe
- Ground
- Affirm
- Journal
- Body Scan
- Cold
- Move
- Delay
The Fall · 15–25 min
You don't have to take our word for it. You'll have your own.
Crest asks two questions: how strong was it at its worst, and how strong was it by the end. Those two numbers turn into the only argument that has ever actually worked — your own track record.
Hit you at 7. You left it at 3. About 16 minutes each.
- Four phasesRise, Crest, Fall, Calm — timed to the research
- 10–20 minutesHow long a typical urge takes to peak and pass
- No streak to loseGiving in doesn't reset anything
When it wins
Slip-ups are data, not failures.
Gave in? Log it. Nothing breaks, no score drops, and nothing lectures you. Crest asks what set it off — because the triggers that beat you are the most useful thing it can learn about you.
Your triggers end up in two lists: the ones you ride out, and the ones that win. The second list is the one worth reading.
Calm Waters
Nobody is watching you do this.
What you're using Crest for is nobody's business. So it's built so that it can't become anybody's business.
- No account, ever. No email, no sign-up, no profile. Open it and it works.
- No analytics, no tracking, no ads. There is no SDK in the app collecting anything about you.
- No servers of ours. Your surfs sync through your own private iCloud, between your own devices. We can't read it — Apple's private database isn't accessible to us.
- Nothing to share. There's no feed, no leaderboard, and no way to broadcast a bad night.
The next one is going to pass too.
You just don't know it yet. That's the part Crest is for.
Download on the App StoreFree · iPhone, iOS 17 or later · No account required