Setting a timed delay before acting on an urge, such as 40 minutes for smoking urges or 1 hour for anger responses, is a strategy to gain control over emotional reactions.

“the exercise here was an exercise suggested by Andy White who of course you very graciously introduced me to and um he said this is an exercise that he does with um patients he's working with who are trying to quit smoking mhm so the exercise is about separating creating a discontinuity between urge and behavior mhm so he says look for the first and I'm probably bastardizing this a little bit but let's just say for the next month you know you're you you come in here and you're smoking two packs a day for the next month I'm not necessarily going to reduce the number of cigarettes you smoke but what I will do is separate the urge from the behavior every time you have the urge to smoke I want you to pull out your phone and set an alarm for 40 minutes don't smoke now but when the alarm goes off go smoke we're g to separate that so you're not just feeding an urge every time it comes up you're going to go smoke and sometimes you might not actually even feel like going for a smoke mhm um and so what the exercise was for me was the next time you know you get some something happens something that is you know something stimulates a response in you that is going to be an outburst of anger and that could be you know you're going to fire off a really nasty email to somebody or you're going to call somebody and tear them apart um pause set an alarm for an hour and then come back and respond in an hour”