Five minutes on a clock, a ring that empties as they pass, and 4-7-8 breathing to put between the urge and your hand. Five is the commitment, not a measurement: the NHS says a craving can run up to fifteen minutes. If yours is still going when the ring empties, start it again.
Cravings beaten today
Starts fresh at midnight. Stored in your browser.
Three hundred seconds, counted down. The ring is a circle with a 478-unit dash and its offset is the fraction of the five minutes still to run, so the gap in the ring is the time left. The colour walks from the site's orange to green across the countdown by moving each of the three channels a proportional step, which is why it is a gradual change rather than a switch at the end.
The breathing pane runs the 4-7-8 pattern: four counts in, seven held, eight out, looping until you stop it or the clock does. That pattern was popularised by Dr Andrew Weil and has roots in pranayama practice; it is a technique, not a treatment, and this page does not claim it does anything to nicotine.
Now the number the page is named after, said carefully. Five minutes is the length of the commitment, not a measurement of a craving. The NHS's own page says cravings last up to fifteen minutes. Five was chosen because it is a stretch of time a person will actually agree to sit through when they very much do not want to, and because the useful move during a craving is to put something between the urge and the hand rather than to wait out a precise duration. If yours is still going at five minutes, start it again — that is a normal outcome and not a sign the method is wrong.
The craving count is tallied per day in this browser. It exists so you can see the count going down over a week, which is the only thing about a craving that a page like this can honestly show you.
Nothing on this page is medically reviewed and nothing above measures anything about you — it explains a calculation. Where a number here is our own judgement rather than a published figure, the note says so and cites nothing; where the health bodies disagree, it carries the disagreement. Method last checked 21 August 2026.
A craving rises, peaks and falls whether or not you smoke. The NHS says a craving lasts up to 15 minutes, and usually only a few; no study has timed a single craving more precisely than that.
The strategy is simple: you do not need to want a cigarette less. You only need to put five minutes between the urge and your hand — and, if it is still there, five more.
The 4-7-8 technique was popularised by Dr Andrew Weil and has roots in pranayama breathing practices. A long, slow out-breath is widely used to calm down. The evidence for breathing against cravings is thin but encouraging: in one small lab study (McClernon, Westman and Rose, 2004), smokers kept off cigarettes for four hours reported less craving and tension when they did controlled deep breathing than when they sat quietly. The authors called it preliminary, and 4-7-8 itself has not been tested.
Using the breathing pattern during a craving keeps your mind occupied, your body calming, and your countdown clock running.
What a nicotine craving is, how long one lasts, and what the evidence says works when it hits — from exercise and urge surfing to using NRT properly.
recovery · 7 min readThe NHS says a craving usually lasts a few minutes and at most about 15. Here is what that means, and how cravings change over the weeks and years after quitting.
quit · 5 min readThe psychology of smoking triggers — how conditioned cues drive relapse and the specific behavioral strategies to defuse each type. Includes a trigger audit.
Free nicotine clearance calculator. Enter your last cigarette and watch live countdowns to carbon monoxide clearing (WHO's 12h mark) and nicotine (72h).
Free nicotine withdrawal timeline. Enter your last cigarette to see which symptoms belong to each phase, when withdrawal peaks, and when it starts easing.
Free quit smoking plan generator. Pick a date and a method, plan around your triggers, and print a one-page plan, a wallet craving card and a calendar file.
A craving is a craving whatever the substance. The alcohol version of this timer lives on our sister site Rebuild — the craving timer at getrebuild.app.
Breathing guide, craving log, and the number nobody else is counting for you.
Burnout is out on iPhone and Android.
Every tool on this site stays free, needs no account, and needs nothing installed.
