The decision to quit smoking is thought to be totally unpredictable. But new research from San Diego State shows most smokers think about kicking the habit on Mondays.
Researchers at SDSU, the Santa Fe Institute, The Monday Campaigns and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health examined Google searches from 2008 to 2012 in English, Chinese and four other major languages. They looked for key words including ‘help quit smoking’ to see whether there were any weekly patterns.
San Diego State professor John W. Ayers led the research. He said his study reveals something surprising.
“The decision to quit isn’t some chaotic, individualized decision, which we often think of it as being," Ayers said. "We see that throughout the year, there’s about 8 million more people wanting to quit in English alone, on Monday, than any other day of the week.”
Ayers pointed out the same pattern was found worldwide across all of the six languages researchers examined.
Ayers said more research is needed to find out why that’s the case. But he says in the meantime, anti-smoking programs could reach a much larger audience by focusing their resources on Mondays.
His findings are published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Internal Medicine.
