Quitting is about trying harder not to fail in the same way next time. There are a finite reasons to smoke, if you eliminate them all you will decide to be smoke free.
Failing is what the process of quitting feels like. It took me lots of failed attempts to quit. The difference between failing forever and failing to quit is you have to be honest with yourself about why you failed, learn from it and fail again in a different way, eventually you will run out of ways to fail and you will be smoke free.
🧠 read on if you want more brain dump 🧠
What this actually feels like: you will get a sense of wanting to quit but also wanting to smoke and at some point in the journey if you do the above you will decide you dont smoke anymore, its easy after that. I mean that, its easy once the decision is made. At this point I started saying "I don't smoke" instead of "im quitting" or " im trying not to smoke".
Unfortunately you cant really reverse engineer this in my experience. Changing your language will help with social pressures particularly, but it probably wont help you decide. I dont know why you cant make the decision at any time, but there is a point where it feels like you are making the decision but you dont get to choose when that is. This cant be forced, it takes time, but it is definitely a skill that improves with practice.
I have done the same thing now with alcohol, and it took a lot less time to reach the decision point and saying "i dont drink". I wanted to quit but I hadn't made the decision so I kept failing and learning until the decision came. In May this year I have been sober for two years.
Quitting isnt about trying harder to not smoke, all your doing here is thinking more about smoking - like trying to force yourself to sleep makes you feel more awake. Its about learning why you fail each time and solving those problems; these might be habits, cravings, triggers, etc. If you arent objective and honest with yourself it wont work. When you want to quit you are in conflict because you also like something about smoking and dont want to stop, you can be both, that the difficulty of being human we hold conflicting thoughts. Failing and figuring out what these things are and fixing or replacing them with something less destructive eliminates the things you think you like abut smoking and leaves more space for "i dont want to smoke, its bad for me", when that voice gets loud enough its easy to decide to quit because youre getting very little out of smoking thats positive.
If you want to do your own research this method is apparently called ambivelance resolution, something I found out later. This advice is retrospective, it took me years to quit because I did it on my own. If you are in the know perhaps you can speed up the process.
Good luck on figuring out how to decide you dont smoke.