Ask two people six months into a quit what they are, and you will get two different answers. One says they are trying to quit, or that they have not had a cigarette since March. The other says they do not smoke. Those are not the same statement, and the difference turns out to predict rather a lot.
The first describes a smoker who is currently abstaining. Smoking is still the baseline; not smoking is the effortful deviation from it. Every craving is a negotiation, because the underlying position is that you would smoke if the reasons not to stopped applying. The second describes someone for whom the question has been settled and is no longer being reopened several times a week.
This is not positive thinking, and it is not about telling yourself something you do not believe. It is about which of two true descriptions you habitually use, because the description you use shapes how each decision gets framed. Someone who does not smoke does not weigh up each cigarette on its merits, any more than you weigh up whether to start collecting stamps. The option is not live. That is an enormous saving of effort, and it is also why late relapse is so much rarer in people who have made the shift.
It tends to happen on its own, eventually, but it happens faster if you do a few things on purpose.
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Change the sentence you use. When someone offers you a cigarette, I do not smoke works considerably better than I am trying to quit or I have given up. The second and third invite a follow-up — how long, are you finding it hard, go on, one will not hurt — because they mark you as someone in the middle of an attempt. The first closes the topic, and it also happens to be true. Say it a few dozen times and you will notice it start to feel less like a performance.
Stop counting, at some point. Day counters are useful early. They give you something concrete when there is nothing else to hold. But a streak is a fragile object by construction, and after a few months the counting can start to work against you, because it keeps smoking at the centre of your self-description and it creates something that can be broken. There is no fixed date for this. Somewhere around three months, if the number is the first thing you think about each morning, consider letting it go.
Notice the small moments that constitute evidence. The first time you drive somewhere without thinking about it, or get through a difficult meeting, or leave a pub at closing time and realise you never once went outside. Those are the events that actually build the new self-description, and they pass unremarked unless you catch them.
Be careful with the phrase I would love one. People say it reflexively, months in, usually to be sociable. It is a small act of reclassification each time, placing you back in the category of person who wants a cigarette and is going without. You probably do not want one, in the sense that matters. You experienced a brief cue.
And decide what you are going to do with the version of the story that includes a slip, because most quits include one. The identity framing survives it easily, provided you apply it: a person who does not smoke had a cigarette on Friday, which was out of character. The streak framing does not survive it at all, because the streak is gone and there is nothing left to be except a smoker again. Same event. Completely different consequences, decided entirely by which description was in place beforehand.