The difficulty of quitting a behavior like smoking may increase with the duration and consistency of the habit, but individual differences and prior habit-change experience can significantly influence success.

“Now what about the negatives? >> Right? So if you take two individuals, one who has been smoking for a year, a pack a day for a year, and one who has been smoking a pack a day for 20 years, is it necessarily the case that the latter is going to have a much more difficult time quitting? Probably. Um because it's a much more ingrained behavior. But this is where individual differences come into play significantly because if that per first person if they're an athlete, if they've worked on other habits in their life, if they've if they've strengthened that muscle around habit change, they might be able to rely on that to give up smoking.”