Teens Aren't Using Nicotine Pouches to Rebel. A New Study Says a Lot of Them Are Using Them to Calm Down.

Ask a 16-year-old why they tucked a nicotine pouch under their lip, and a surprising number will not say “to look cool.” They will say it helps them relax.

When a teenager says a nicotine pouch calms them down, that is not a reason to use it. That is the first symptom of needing it.

A study published this month in Pediatrics by Yi-Chun Chang, Adam Leventhal, and colleagues surveyed 484 young people across the US who had ever used nicotine pouches in 2025. The top reasons: experimentation (32.3%), the nicotine buzz (30.5%), relaxation (22.7%), flavors (17.4%), and convenience (16.5%), per the Partnership to End Addiction’s summary. The sharper finding is what predicted who kept going. Kids who said they used pouches for flavor, for convenience, or because they already felt addicted were 1.5 to 2.35 times as likely to have used in the past month, and used more often.

Here is the psychology in plain terms. Nicotine relieves the restlessness and irritability that nicotine itself creates once your brain gets used to it. So “it calms me down” often means “it ends the small withdrawal I didn’t know I had.” A teenager reporting relaxation in the same survey as feeling addicted is not describing two different kids. They are often describing the same kid a few months apart.

Convenience matters just as much. A pouch has no smoke, no smell, no device to hide. It can be used in class. Every barrier that used to slow a habit down is gone, which is part of why the FDA’s January 2025 decision authorizing 20 Zyn products was explicitly about adult smokers, not kids. We wrote about how pouches can be safer than cigarettes and still build dependence, and about the political fight over vapes and pouches this week. This study adds the kids’ own words.

For pediatricians, school nurses, and youth counselors, the move this week: ask about pouches by name, separately from vaping, because many teens do not count them as “nicotine use.” Then ask the follow-up this study suggests: “What does it do for you?” If the answer is stress, treat the stress and the nicotine together. Our nicotine and tobacco hub has more.

If you are young and reading this with a pouch in: wanting to feel calmer is not the problem. The problem is a product that sells you calm by first taking it away.