About 70 per cent of smokers want to quit, but smokers have a much higher rate of depression and anxiety than those who don’t smoke. There’s also growing evidence that the longer you smoke, the more likely you are to develop some of these negative emotional states. Each year, 34 per cent of smokers try to kick the habit. But only about five per cent of those attempts are successful.
When you quit, in some sense it’s like mourning. Nicotine stimulates some brain regions stimulated by interaction with a loved one. So when smokers say, “I feel like I lost my best friend,” neurologically, they have. Don’t be too optimistic about what quitting is going to be like; that will make you better prepared. As opposed to mourning a loved one who is gone forever, here the loved one is available at the nearest convenience store. Once a person has a single puff, the odds are 80 to 85 percent they will go back to full-time smoking.
The most characteristic way people relapse is that they encounter an upsetting stressor — an argument, anger or anxiety. Negative mood inflates the incentive value of drug use: expectations that smoking will soothe that negative mood increase. But as soon as the body’s nicotine level starts to drop, they start to go through withdrawal again, so smokers are most likely to quit only in their third, fourth or fifth attempt. Nothing predicts success like failure.