_____ Starts Monday

From NYT’s Well blog, today is the day our lives will change:

If you are thinking of quitting smoking, it is probably Monday.

Researchers monitored Google search queries from 2008 to 2012 in English, French, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Almost every week, queries about smoking cessation peaked on Mondays.

The study, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that during the study period, the number of queries in English on Mondays was 1 percent larger than on Tuesdays, 11 percent larger than Wednesdays, 22 percent larger than Thursdays, 67 percent larger than Fridays, 145 percent larger than Saturdays and 59 percent larger than Sundays. Only in Russian did Monday queries come in second to Sunday.

When I was in high school I got to go on a trip to Chile, where I stayed with a host family. After sitting through an excruciatingly long dinner my first night there, during which I understood about five words total, my host-mother served us dessert and yelled out, “La dieta comienza el lunes!” (“Diet starts Monday!”) It was the first thing I’d been able to translate on the go, and so I basically fell out of the chair laughing. I say it to myself every time I order takeout on Sunday nights. Anyway, today we’re all going to quit smoking, so congratulations are in order. Pour yourself a drink! [Well, JAMA Network]