Fun fact: the stress that smoking cigarettes relieves is only the stress caused by the addiction/relapse from nicotine. Surely, there might be some placebo effects going on, but nicotine is not a stress relieving chemical.
So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.
Zyn is freebase nicotine which does show some signs of being performance enhancing; mostly around focus. There are a lot of people with unmedicated ADHD self-medicating with Zyn, or vapes, or smoking due to the this.
So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.