High Stakes, Clear Head: How Performers, Athletes, and Executives Use Vaping to Manage Pressure
Pressure is universal. The specific flavor of it changes — a sold-out arena, a boardroom full of investors, a locker room ten minutes before tip-off — but the physiological experience is remarkably similar. Heart rate climbs. Thoughts scatter. The body does its best impression of a car revving too hard in park.
How people manage that state is deeply personal. Some meditate. Some run. Some have a ritual that looks small from the outside but means everything in the moment. For a growing number of high-performing adults across industries, vaping has become part of that toolkit — not as a crutch, but as a deliberate, considered element of a broader stress-management routine.
We spoke with adults from different worlds about how they think about vaping under pressure. Their answers were honest, thoughtful, and a little surprising.
The Pre-Show Ritual: A Working Musician's Perspective
Dani, 34, plays keyboards for a touring band based out of Nashville. She's performed in venues ranging from 200-seat clubs to festival stages with crowds in the tens of thousands. The anxiety, she says, doesn't really scale down with experience.
"People think once you've done it a thousand times, it gets easy. And it does get easier — but the nerves don't go away. You kind of need them. They're fuel."
Dani switched from cigarettes to vaping about three years ago and noticed almost immediately that her pre-show routine changed. "With cigarettes, I'd smoke two or three backstage and feel kind of gross before going on. With vaping, I can take a few puffs, get that moment of stillness, and not feel like I just made a bad decision."
She's deliberate about what she reaches for before a show. A lower-nicotine salt device, a menthol-adjacent flavor she finds grounding. "It's not about the nicotine, really. It's about having something that signals to my brain: okay, we're doing this. Time to focus."
That ritualistic dimension — the psychological cue, not just the chemical one — came up repeatedly in our conversations.
The Locker Room and Beyond: A Strength Coach's Take
Marco, 41, has spent fifteen years working as a strength and conditioning coach at the college level in the Southeast. He's careful to separate his personal habits from anything he'd recommend professionally, but he's also candid about the reality of high-pressure sports environments.
"In my world, you have coaches, trainers, support staff — adults who are managing enormous stress on a daily basis. The conversation about how people cope with that is real and ongoing."
Marco himself vapes. He started after a particularly brutal season that left him, by his own admission, "running on coffee and cortisol." He was already working on sleep, nutrition, and exercise habits. Vaping replaced the occasional cigarette he'd been sneaking when stress peaked.
"I'm not going to tell you it's a health product. But for me, it was a harm-reduction choice. I was going to do something when the pressure got intense. I'd rather it be this than what I was doing before."
He's also thoughtful about timing. "I'm not vaping right before a workout or anything like that. It's more of a wind-down tool. After a long game day, before I try to decompress and sleep."
The Boardroom: An Entrepreneur's Honest Assessment
Kira, 38, co-founded a logistics software company in Chicago that now employs over 60 people. She's done investor pitches, acquisition negotiations, and more high-stakes presentations than she can count. She's also refreshingly direct about her relationship with her vape.
"I started vaping when I was going through our Series A fundraise. It was the most stressful period of my professional life. I wasn't sleeping. I was running on adrenaline. A friend suggested I try it instead of the glass of wine I was having every night just to come down."
Kira doesn't vape in professional settings — she's clear about that. "That's not the context. It's a before and after thing for me. Before a big pitch, I'll step outside, take a few minutes, breathe. Having the vape in my hand gives me something to do with the anxiety that isn't pacing in circles."
She's also thought about the optics. "I'm a woman in a male-dominated industry. I'm already navigating a lot of perception management. I'm not interested in making vaping part of my professional image. But in my private life, it's mine, and it works for me."
What the Ritual Is Really About
Across these conversations, a few themes kept surfacing that go beyond the product itself.
The pause is the point. Every person we talked to described vaping less as something they do and more as a reason to stop. To step outside. To breathe. To create a physical boundary between the pressure and the performance. The vape is a prop in a larger ritual of self-regulation.
Intentionality matters. None of these people described vaping mindlessly. They were deliberate about when, what, and how much. That level of self-awareness seems to be what separates a lifestyle tool from a habit that's running the show.
It replaced something worse. For Dani, it replaced cigarettes. For Marco, it replaced stress-smoking. For Kira, it replaced nightly alcohol. The comparison isn't to an idealized smoke-free life — it's to the actual alternatives people were already choosing.
A Note on Honest Expectations
None of the people we spoke with claimed vaping is a performance enhancer or a magic stress solution. They were unanimous on that. It's a small piece of a larger system — one that also includes sleep, exercise, professional support, and the kind of hard-won experience that only comes from doing difficult things repeatedly.
What they did say is that it's theirs. It fits their lifestyle, their values, and their specific relationship with pressure. And for adults making informed choices about their own habits, that autonomy matters.
At Angel Cigs, we think that's exactly the right framing. Vaping isn't a fix. But for a lot of high-performing adults, it's a considered, intentional part of how they show up — and that's worth talking about honestly.
