It’s the best way I’ve seen to quit smoking—it seems to work every time.
The second of these claims would be extremely surprising to me, even if weakened to ’90% of the time’ to allow for figures of speech. Even a success rate of 50% would be startling. I don’t believe it.
It’s not surprising to me, though I imagine it’s vulnerable to massive selection effect. My observation is about people who actually internalized being a non-smoker, not those who tried to do so and failed. I’m not surprised those two things are extremely highly correlated. So it might not be any better as strategy advice than “the best way to quit smoking is to successfully quit smoking”.
Even a success rate of 50% would be startling. I don’t believe it.
Which is ironic, because the Wikipedia page you just linked to says that “95% of former smokers who had been abstinent for 1–10 years had made an unassisted last quit attempt”, with the most frequent method of unassisted quitting being “cold turkey”, about which it was said that:
53% of the ex-smokers said that it was “not at all difficult” to stop
Of course, the page also says that lots of people don’t successfully quit, which isn’t incompatible with what thomblake says. Among people who are able to congruently decide to become non-smokers, it’s apparently one of the easiest and most successful ways to do it.
It’s just that not everybody can decide to be a non-smoker, or that it occurs to them to do so.
Anecdotally, my wife said that she’d “quit smoking” several times prior, each time for extrinsic reasons (e.g. dating a guy who didn’t smoke, etc.). When she “became a non-smoker” instead (as she calls it), she did it for her own reasons. She says that as soon as she came to the conclusion that she needed to stop for good, she decided that “quitting smoking” wasn’t good enough to do the job, and that she would have to become a non-smoker instead. (That was over 20 years ago, fwiw.)
I’m not sure how you’d go about prescribing that people do this: either they have an intrinsic desire to do it or not. You can certainly encourage and assist, but intrinsic motivation is, well, intrinsic. It’s rather difficult to decide on purpose to do something of your own free will, if you’re really trying to do it because of some extrinsic reason. ;-)
Which is ironic, because the Wikipedia page you just linked to says that “95% of former smokers who had been abstinent for 1–10 years had made an unassisted last quit attempt”, with the most frequent method of unassisted quitting being “cold turkey”, about which it was said that:
wedrifid is asking for P(success|attempt), not P(attempt|success), and so a high P(attempt|success) isn’t ironic.
The second of these claims would be extremely surprising to me, even if weakened to ’90% of the time’ to allow for figures of speech. Even a success rate of 50% would be startling. I don’t believe it.
It’s not surprising to me, though I imagine it’s vulnerable to massive selection effect. My observation is about people who actually internalized being a non-smoker, not those who tried to do so and failed. I’m not surprised those two things are extremely highly correlated. So it might not be any better as strategy advice than “the best way to quit smoking is to successfully quit smoking”.
Which is ironic, because the Wikipedia page you just linked to says that “95% of former smokers who had been abstinent for 1–10 years had made an unassisted last quit attempt”, with the most frequent method of unassisted quitting being “cold turkey”, about which it was said that:
Of course, the page also says that lots of people don’t successfully quit, which isn’t incompatible with what thomblake says. Among people who are able to congruently decide to become non-smokers, it’s apparently one of the easiest and most successful ways to do it.
It’s just that not everybody can decide to be a non-smoker, or that it occurs to them to do so.
Anecdotally, my wife said that she’d “quit smoking” several times prior, each time for extrinsic reasons (e.g. dating a guy who didn’t smoke, etc.). When she “became a non-smoker” instead (as she calls it), she did it for her own reasons. She says that as soon as she came to the conclusion that she needed to stop for good, she decided that “quitting smoking” wasn’t good enough to do the job, and that she would have to become a non-smoker instead. (That was over 20 years ago, fwiw.)
I’m not sure how you’d go about prescribing that people do this: either they have an intrinsic desire to do it or not. You can certainly encourage and assist, but intrinsic motivation is, well, intrinsic. It’s rather difficult to decide on purpose to do something of your own free will, if you’re really trying to do it because of some extrinsic reason. ;-)
wedrifid is asking for P(success|attempt), not P(attempt|success), and so a high P(attempt|success) isn’t ironic.