As far as I understand, your experience mirrors the research. External motivation (like a reward/penalty, accountability partner, etc) is weak. Internal motiva

As far as I understand, your experience mirrors the research. External motivation (like a reward/penalty, accountability partner, etc) is weak. Internal motivation is incredibly strong. So the question becomes, how do you get internally motivated? I wish I had a reference, but I remember hearing about a study (here on HN) about where internal motivation comes from. The conclusion — a mixture of 3 elements: Purpose, competence, and freedom. Basically, you're in a situation where there's something that needs done. You have a strong sense of purpose that it ought to be done. (There's a huge "why" element to this!) You have the freedom to achieve it in whatever means you see fit. And you have any skills necessary. Sounds like with DuoLingo, you're already at the point where it's a locked in habit. (So your mind is on autopilot with that, not requiring a lot of motivation.) But with smoking, you never had enough internal motivation. And I imagine smoking like other "bad" habits has a big emotional element to it. (You turn to it to calm down stress/anxiety.) Have you thought about those emotional elements and what's causing those? Maybe trying to address those things _on top of_ an effort to kick smoking would be more effective.