Starbirder,
Congratulations to you for having stayed on course for another month. Double green is a great accomplishment as is double green plus one day and double green plus two days. I just passed 2 years 11 months and I am still grateful, on a daily basis, that I am a recovering, not an active, nicotine addict.

Your frustrations with where you are in recovery are a result of your expectations. You expected that you would feel better today than you did one month ago or you perceive that it was easier one month ago to deal with thoughts of nicotine than it is today. Maybe the thoughts were fewer then than they are now and that just doesn't make sense to you. I won't tell you to lower your expectations but I do suggest that you learn to live one day at a time. When you smoked tobacco you had good days and bad. I would venture to guess that on the bad days you would smoke more tobacco as your stress level sent you into frequent early withdrawal. As a recovering addict, you will continue to experience life's ups and downs with one marked difference - You will do it without nicotine. That is HUGE.

Because your conditioned response to any stress, small or large, has been to introduce nicotine into your system, it will take some time to recondition yourself to live without it. It will continue to get easier in general as time passes but you may still find it challenging occasionally. You listed many health benefits of quitting in your post. They are immediately obvious to most of us and prompt many to write asking "Is this normal?". The psychological healing is more complex but we want answers. We want to know when so that we have a definitive goal to work towards.

One day at a time is all that we we can offer you. It may not sound like much or the answer that you want but I promise you that if you can learn to live this way, your frustrations with your progress will soon be gone. The passage of time is relative to our satisfaction with where we are presently. When we are enjoying ourselves, we perceive time to be fleeting, when things are going badly we sense that time stands still but the earth rotates at a constant rate and revolves around the sun, not us. Our ability to heal the wounds of this addiction is largely dependent upon our ability to accept that we are nicotine addicts and our ability to learn how to deal with life without first pausing for a dopamine rush.

Don't worry about minor setbacks in your recovery. In the long run life is immeasurably better when you never take another puff.

Joseph
Gold x2