Welcome to EX...sorry that you are having a hard time but I suspect that MOST of us can relate very closely to that feeling that the crave never goes away...at the beginning. I lost quits because of that feeling, I felt like I was fighting the craves all of the time and it exhausted me. It's called white knuckling your quit. You need to accept that the craves WILL come and try to figure out what the triggers are...I understand that right now it seems like one HUGE trigger. My husband is a recovering alcoholic (33+ years) who quit smoking 5 years after he quit drinking. I told him when I quit this time...over four years ago, that I thought I was going to lose my mind because all I could think about was smoking. He suggested something that I was, shall we say, somewhat quizzical about. He told me to get on my knees and ask God to remove the mental obsession. He told me that was what I was feeling...mentally obsessed and he remembered it well from the beginning of his recoveries. I decided that I really had nothing to lose, whether or not I believed that it was going to help. I did it...down on my knees, literally tearfully BEGGING to have the mental obsession removed. Was it all smooth sailing from then on in? No...it absolutely was not but it WAS better, something palpable changed. I came to this site every morning and every evening in the beginning of my quit and I still do most days...coming here and reading blogs and commenting and seeing how others are doing has been priceless for me. We all have different journeys but they ARE journeys. Some people really do feel fewer or less intense craves or at least that is what they talk about. I remember thinking that I really was going to lose my mind. I did not want to smoke, I knew that it was suicide and that I was forcing the people who love me to watch me commit suicide, how cruel is that? You read these accounts of people having very few craves and you wonder what is going on with you...I read about people having more and more energy and taking long walks and feeling great. I have COPD and it is progressive, not smoking slows the progression but it still marches on. I exercise regularly, I eat a healthy diet, and I do everything I can to take care of myself. I KNOW that smoking does not HELP with anything, it does not take away physical pain, stress, sadness, or anything that I found or FIND uncomfortable. The nicotine addiction tells me that smoking will fix everything when, in fact, it not only does not fix anything, it just makes us pay the fiddler, so to speak, later on. Don't give up...read everything you can about this addiction, don't expect that your recovery is going to be easy, expect that it is going to be one day at a time and when a day is too long, it can be one hour at a time or one minute or one second. I said NOPE, Not One Puff Ever, over and over and over again when I first quit. I read blogs, I listened to the advice of the people on this site and I started to grow, slowly but surely, I started to get stronger and I started to feel better about myself. This IS possible, you CAN do this, stay close to the site, lean on the people here. We all want very much for you to succeed.
Ellen
