One of the first decisions of a quit has nothing to do with nicotine: who gets told.
People tend to arrive with a strong instinct in one direction, and the instinct is usually a reaction to how the last attempt went. If you announced it loudly last time and then went back to smoking in front of everyone who knew, the appeal of doing it quietly this time is obvious. If you kept it to yourself last time and slid back without anyone noticing, you may be reaching for the opposite.
Both instincts contain something true.
Telling people works because it converts a private intention into a fact in the world. It is harder to quietly reverse something other people know about. You also get practical help: friends who do not offer you one, a partner who stops smoking in the car, colleagues who stop calling you out to the smoking area. Those are not small. A large part of what makes early quitting difficult is the environment, and the environment is mostly made of other people who do not know what you are attempting.
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Telling people also creates pressure, which is the honest cost. Being watched is tiring. Every conversation can turn into a progress report. And if you slip, you now have an audience for it, which raises the odds that a single cigarette gets reframed as a public failure rather than a private event. That reframing is what turns slips into relapses.
Not telling anyone has the mirror-image profile. You get to attempt it without performing it. You can have a bad week without it being a topic. But you keep an environment that is still arranged around a smoker, you get no practical help at all, and crucially you keep a silent exit available. The ability to stop quietly, with nobody ever knowing there was an attempt, removes the last bit of friction at the moment friction is most useful.
The version most people land on after a few attempts is neither extreme. Tell a small number of specific people for specific reasons, and do not announce it generally.
Tell whoever you live with, always, even if you would rather not. They control your environment more than anyone and they will notice the mood anyway. Not telling them means they keep smoking in the kitchen and you get the irritability blamed on something else.
Tell the people who habitually offer you cigarettes. This is the most practical category and the one people skip. Two or three colleagues and a couple of friends cover most of the risk, and it turns them from hazards into help without requiring any announcement.
Tell one person you can be honest with, who is not in either group above. Somebody you can text at eleven at night to say this is hard, without it becoming a conversation about whether you are going to manage it. This is the one that matters most and the one most often missing.
Do not post it publicly in week one. Social announcements generate a wave of support that feels excellent on day two and turns into a very public ledger by week six. If you want to say it publicly, say it at three months, when it is a fact rather than a promise.
How you phrase it also matters more than it should. I have quit invites scrutiny of the attempt. I do not smoke does not, because it describes a state rather than a project. The second is also the phrasing that makes declining easier for the rest of your life, so you may as well start using it on day one.
And if you have already told everyone and now regret it, the fix is not to take it back. It is to stop giving updates. People follow your lead on this: if you stop reporting, they stop asking, usually within a fortnight.