Your close friend smoked for fifteen years and once day tossed his last pack in the toilet and never started again. Your mom’s cousin’s aunt quit cold turkey after someone told her at a party that smoking was unattractive. Why can’t you kick the habit?

Why can so many seemingly break the habit at the drop of a hat? A study in the British Medical Journal, suggests that there are plenty of smokers who just need one final kick in the pants to realize that the dangers of cigarettes or tobacco should be taken seriously.

According to the study, the tipping point is when smokers have some sort of epiphany in which they realize that the costs of smoking are just not worth it. This could be a storm that keeps them from going out to get a pack of cigarettes or seeing a dirty ashtray and decide that smoking is disgusting. Surprisingly, unplanned attempts were more than twice as likely to succeed as planned ones.

So all it takes is something to catch you off guard where you’re like “this is stupid, I’m done.” Maybe there is no real need for all the advertising and public service announcements to help smoker’s quit. It could be a more sudden realization that makes you stop - hopefully that one small moment does indeed come, leading to a big change.