If this isn't your first attempt to quit, you're not alone! Most people who give up smoking, some of them even years after, find themselves smoking again. Most people who eventually quit for good have tried, and failed, multiple times first. So don't despair.
It is not simply a lack of willpower. To give up smoking for seven days takes an enormous amount of willpower. To still be not smoking a year or two later takes great self-discipline, but it shouldn't have to! More on that in a moment.
The numbers make this clear. Smoking kills more than 24,000 Australians every year — 66 lives every single day, according to a 2025 ANU study. In the UK, there were 74,800 deaths attributed to smoking in 2019 among adults aged 35 and over. These aren't people who never tried to quit. Most of them probably tried, many times.
So why does it keep happening?
The common explanation — "I just don't have enough willpower/self-discipline" — may be true. I can relate to that. Given all of the stresses in life it is genuinely hard to maintain that willpower, year-in, year out. But what if there was a way to change things up, so that you no longer needed self-discipline, you no longer ever had to fight down the urge to smoke? Wouldn't that be a game changer?
If you have beaten the physical addiction, what is going on in your head that continually makes you want to smoke? Something else is going on beneath the surface: an automatic, unconscious response that undermines the conscious decision to quit, often without you even noticing it happening.
That's the argument at the centre of Why You Are Still Smoking — not another list of willpower tips, but a look at what's actually sabotaging the attempt, and what to do about it.
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