Young adults vape for a mix of reasons that shift over time. The motivations that get someone to try their first e-cigarette, like curiosity and peer influence, are different from the ones that keep them vaping months later, which increasingly center on stress relief and nicotine dependence. About 1 in 6 adults aged 21 to 24 used e-cigarettes in 2023, making them the highest-use age group in the country.
Social Influence Starts the Habit
The single most common reason young people give for trying an e-cigarette is that a friend used one. Curiosity comes next, followed by seeing a family member vape. This peer dynamic is powerful because vaping has been normalized in social settings in a way cigarettes no longer are. Researchers at Georgia State University studying social influence around vaping describe a perception that “the cool kids are using e-cigs,” a framing that makes the behavior feel aspirational rather than risky.
Unlike cigarettes, which carry decades of social stigma, vaping doesn’t trigger the same alarm bells in a group setting. You can vape indoors, in a car, or at a party without the smoke smell or the social friction. That visibility and ease of use means young adults are exposed to vaping constantly in their peer groups, which reinforces the idea that it’s a normal, low-stakes thing to do.
Flavors Are a Powerful Draw
Flavored products play an outsized role in getting young adults to start. In survey data from the American Heart Association, young adults aged 18 to 24 were nearly twice as likely as people aged 35 to 44 to identify flavors as the main reason they picked up vaping. While flavor was the third most common reason for starting across all age groups (cited by about 30% of users), it ranked first among young adults specifically.
Flavors don’t just attract new users. They keep people vaping. Users of flavored e-cigarettes were twice as likely to report high satisfaction compared to those using unflavored products. Mint and menthol users were nearly three times more likely to report satisfaction. Perhaps most telling, people who used flavored e-cigarettes were about three and a half times more likely to describe themselves as addicted compared to unflavored users. The flavors mask the harshness of nicotine, making it easier to inhale deeply and frequently, which accelerates the path to dependence.
Stress and Mental Health Fuel Continued Use
Once the habit takes hold, the reasons for vaping shift. The most common reason young people give for currently using e-cigarettes is “I am feeling anxious, stressed, or depressed.” This isn’t just anecdotal. A study of 436 young adult vapers (average age 25) found that higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression were all significantly associated with vaping for tension reduction or relaxation. People experiencing severe anxiety were more likely to vape for this reason than those with minimal, mild, or moderate anxiety. The same pattern held for depression: those with severe symptoms were more likely to use vaping as a coping tool.
The irony is that nicotine creates its own cycle of stress. When nicotine levels drop, you feel irritable and anxious. Taking a hit relieves those withdrawal symptoms, which your brain interprets as stress relief. Over time, vaping doesn’t reduce your baseline anxiety. It just creates a new source of it, then temporarily solves the problem it caused.
How Nicotine Rewires the Reward System
Nicotine activates receptors on brain cells that release dopamine, the chemical your brain uses to tag experiences as rewarding and worth repeating. This dopamine surge travels through the same pathway involved in processing reinforcement from food, social connection, and other drugs. In nonsmokers, nicotine appears to make reward-related information feel more noticeable and important, essentially turning up the volume on the signal that says “this was good, do it again.”
This matters more in young adults because the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and long-term decision-making, doesn’t fully mature until the mid-20s. The reward system, meanwhile, is already running at full strength. That imbalance means the “this feels good” signal is louder, and the “maybe I shouldn’t” signal is quieter. It’s a neurological setup that makes nicotine particularly hard to resist during this age window.
Vaping Creates Its Own Kind of Dependence
Nicotine dependence from vaping looks different from cigarette addiction in ways that can make it harder to recognize and harder to quit. Qualitative research with young adult vapers identified several dependence symptoms unique to e-cigarettes. Because you can vape anywhere, indoors or out, with no ash and minimal odor, there are fewer natural stopping points. Multiple participants reported consuming more nicotine after switching from cigarettes to vaping specifically because they could use their device everywhere, without the social restrictions that limited cigarette breaks.
The constant accessibility also makes it difficult to track how much nicotine you’re actually taking in. A cigarette has a clear beginning and end. A vape does not. Young adults in the study described keeping their device within arm’s reach at all times. Some reported sleeping with it under their pillow and using it first thing in the morning, a behavior that in cigarette research is one of the strongest indicators of heavy dependence.
Withdrawal symptoms included headaches, difficulty concentrating in class, irritability, and trouble sleeping. One participant described hitting her vape once before bed just to quiet the withdrawal enough to fall asleep. These symptoms can appear quickly, sometimes within weeks of regular use with high-concentration nicotine products.
Young Adults Underestimate the Relative Risk
Risk perception plays a quiet but important role. Data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health study showed that only about 25% of U.S. adults correctly identified e-cigarettes as less harmful than combustible cigarettes by 2015-2016, down from 41% two years earlier. Meanwhile, the share of adults who believed vaping was equally or more harmful than smoking rose to nearly 73%.
This seems counterintuitive. If people think vaping is dangerous, why do they still do it? Part of the answer is that young adults often hold contradictory beliefs. They may acknowledge vaping carries risks in the abstract while not feeling personally vulnerable, especially when everyone around them is doing it. The perception gap also works in another direction: among current e-cigarette users, 43.5% viewed vaping as less harmful than smoking, compared to just 23% of people who had never vaped. Users may rationalize the habit by framing it as the “safer” option, even if they aren’t using it as a smoking cessation tool.
A Patchwork of Regulations
Federal regulation of flavored vapes has stalled. Proposed rules to restrict flavored tobacco products were withdrawn by the Trump administration in January 2025, leaving regulation largely to individual states. A handful of states have moved on their own. New Jersey prohibits the sale of all flavored vaping products. New York bans flavored e-cigarettes unless they’ve received specific FDA approval. But in most of the country, flavored disposable vapes remain widely available, both through legal retailers and a growing gray market of unauthorized products.
The result is that the factors driving young adult vaping, easy access to appealing flavored products, social normalization, and the rapid onset of nicotine dependence, remain largely intact. Rates reflect this: e-cigarette use among 21- to 24-year-olds climbed from 10.1% in 2019 to 15.5% in 2023, even as public awareness of vaping’s risks grew during the same period.