Well done on getting into day 4 :) There are several parts to your post that I want to give you my thoughts on. First, and maybe most importantly, you talked about how great you were feeling when you went of a hike with your friend. This is important because you are already noticing benefits to quitting this horrible addiction. Attitude can make a big difference in being successful with your quit. Try as much as you can to focus on the positive things rather then the difficult temporary symptoms.
The fact that you are fine with cravings sometimes and struggling with them at other times is normal for the early stage quit. It's a real roller coaster for a while but that WILL even out with time. Things are a little different for everyone in terms of timing but I can promise you that things WILL get better and easier to manage as time goes by. The 6 minute rule for a craving will not necessarily be the case always for you. Some are very short lived and other days, I can remember the whole day seemed like one big crave to smoke. Those are the days you really need to focus on maintaining your quit. As bad as things may seem on any given day, that won't last so just distract yourself any way you can during those times.
You also spoke about some challenges in your live and if those are connected to the way you are feeling about your quit. Not really but you are thinking they are because you still believe smoking will help when you are feeling anxious about something. This is dangerous thinking because that nicodemon inside your head is trying to make excuses for you to feel it's OK to smoke again. DON'T listen to that junkie thinking!! Good stuff and bad stuff is going to happen in your life whether you smoke or not. That's just life. All you are doing when you smoke is you feed the nicotine addiction. That's all smoking is. The constant feeding of the addiction. You don't do that any more and yes, that makes you feel anxious and will do until you put in enough time in your quit where your brain has rewired itself to allow you to live day to day life as a non-smoker and not feel like you are missing something. This is the part of quitting that takes a long time and you just have to put in that time in order to free yourself - we all do.
You will be fine Shanakor providing you adhere to the one simple rule of quitting - just NOPE every day no matter what :)
Another thing you might want to do is make a list of the reasons you wanted to quit in the first place and keep that list handy so you can take it out when you are feeling weak or anxious. You had reasons that were important enough that you were compelled to quit in the first place. Reminding yourself of those reasons often can help keep you on track.
You can make a post in the "Prerespond to Your Own SOS" thread. It's in the SOS Board Section at the top of the main page. The benefit of that is that if you ever feel you just can't carry on, read your own post about why you quit in the first place. It may just help to save your quit.
