Researchers say most smokers think about quitting on the first day of the week

Oct 29, 2013 21:36 GMT  ·  By
People generally think about giving up smoking on a Monday, researchers find
   People generally think about giving up smoking on a Monday, researchers find

Smokers usually experience a strong desire to kick the habit on Monday, researchers writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Internal Medicine say.

Hence the fact that, as an analysis of Google search query logs between the years 2008 and 2012 has shown, it is on Monday that most people find themselves typing “help quit smoking” in their search bars.

Thus, Monday searches for tips on how to quit smoking were 11%, 67% and 145% greater than those on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, respectively.

What's interesting is that this behavior was recorded among people of very different nationalities, i.e. English, French, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, which is why researchers theorize that there is a global predisposition toward giving up smoking early in the week.

“Popular belief has been that the decision to quit smoking is unpredictable or even chaotic. By taking a bird's-eye view of Google searches, however, we find anything but chaos,” study leader John W. Ayers with the San Diego State University says, as cited by EurekAlert.

“Instead, Google search data reveal interest in quitting is part of a larger collective pattern of behavior dependent on the day of the week,” he further details.

In light of these findings, the researchers recommend that anti-smoking campaigns be organized in such ways that they take into account most people's tendency to be more likely to quit on a Monday.

“Campaigns for people to quit may benefit from shifting to weekly cues. We know it takes smokers many quit attempts before they succeed, so prompting them to try again on Mondays may be an effective and easy to implement campaign,” Joanna E. Cohen with the Johns Hopkins Institute for Global Tobacco Control says.

The researchers who worked on this project wish to carry out further investigations and determine why it is that smokers are more determined to kick the habit on a Monday than they are in the later days of the week. What's more, investigating whether or not other behaviors also display such weekly patterns might also prove worthwhile.