Lesson 6 of 10
Deciding ahead of time
Some urges are regulars. The urge to send the message you’ll wish you could unsend. To quit on the spot. To go back to the thing you swore off. You know yours — they show up on schedule, and they always sound most convincing at the exact moment you’re least equipped to argue back.
So don’t argue with them in the moment. Pros & Cons is a way to make the decision early, while you’re calm and thinking clearly — and then hand that decision to the future version of you who’ll need it at full volume.
Why two columns aren’t enough
You’ve probably made a pros-and-cons list before: one column for, one column against. The DBT version goes further, because urges are sneakier than that. It starts by admitting something most lists skip: the urge has real pros. Acting on it usually brings fast relief — that’s exactly why it keeps winning.
So instead of two columns, you fill four squares: the pros and cons of acting on the urge, and the pros and cons of riding it out. Leave out the urge’s upside and the list becomes a lie you won’t believe later. Write all four squares and you can finally see the whole picture — including the costs that don’t arrive until tomorrow.
The four squares
Pros of acting on the urge. Be honest here. Relief. Release. Feeling heard. Making the ache quiet down for a minute. If this square ends up empty, you’re not being straight with yourself — and you’ll know it.
Cons of acting on the urge. The morning after. The apology. The cleanup. The way giving in makes the next urge louder. Include the slow costs, not just the instant ones.
Pros of riding it out. What does waiting protect? Self-respect, a day without regret, proof that the urge passes on its own, the things you actually want staying intact.
Cons of riding it out. This square matters too. Riding it out means sitting with discomfort while the urge yells at you. Naming that cost up front means it can’t ambush you later.
Write it calm, read it hot
Timing is the whole trick. You fill out the four squares when you’re calm — a quiet Sunday, a steady afternoon — for an urge that keeps coming back. Calm-you can see all four squares clearly. Urge-you can’t, and doesn’t have to.
Then, when the urge hits, you don’t reason from scratch. You open the note and read what you already decided. The urge gets to make its case; calm-you already wrote the reply.
What it looks like
Every few weeks, usually late at night, Priya gets the urge to text her ex. Just one message. Just to see. She knows how it goes — she’s sent that text before — but at 11 p.m. with the phone already in her hand, the urge sounds completely reasonable.
One calm Saturday afternoon, she fills in the four squares instead. Texting him would take the ache away for an hour, and she writes that down honestly. It would also restart the whole loop: days of checking her phone, the slow bad ending all over again. Not texting keeps the distance she chose, and the mornings she’s proud of. It also means the ache has nowhere to go tonight — true, and worth writing down. Two weeks later the urge arrives on schedule. She opens the note, reads all four squares twice, and puts the phone face-down. The urge hangs around for a while. Then it doesn’t.
Try it now
Pick one urge that visits you again and again — to text someone, lash out, give up, go back. Open your notes app or grab a piece of paper, and draw four squares.
Square one: the pros of acting on the urge — write the honest ones, including the relief. Square two: the cons of acting on it — count the costs that arrive later, not just tonight. Square three: the pros of riding it out — everything that waiting protects. Square four: the cons of riding it out — what the wait will really cost you, named in advance so it can’t surprise you.
Keep it somewhere you can find it fast. The whole point is that next time, you don’t have to out-argue the urge — you just have to read.