Smoking clinic failures and recent life stress

To test the assumption that people with greater current life stress would more likely fail at quitting smoking in stop smoking clinics, 231 smokers who attended at least one session of an ongoing series of clinics were given a "Life Change Inventory" and had their smoking status assessed at the clinic's end. A high life stress score was a strong predictor for men (n = 88) of continuing smoking and dropping out of the clinics, but not for the women (n = 143). No difference in the numbers of life change items was reported between the sexes. Younger, lighter-smoking women did significantly better at stopping than older, heavier-smoking females, a relationship not found in the males. For this sample's males, life stress appears to be an important factor reducing motivation when undertaking changing another habit. It seems reasonable to counsel males under high life stress about their low chances of stopping smoking before subjecting themselves to a failure experience in a clinic.