Time to unmute and unwind.
There is now scientific support for “ Zoom Fatigue, ” the term for the exhaustion that both home workers and remote learning students feel from more than a year of working, studying, and partying via video call.
Spending our days staring at colleagues or peers really starts to mess with our brains, according to a researcher from Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, whose findings were published in the journal “Technology, Mind and Behavior.”
“This piece outlines a theoretical explanation … why the current video conferencing implementation is so exhaustive,” writes Jeremy N. Bailenson in his paper, citing “nonverbal overload” as the root cause of video chat misery.
Bailenson argues that the constant video conferencing distorts our sense of intimacy and causes unnecessary stress.
“Op Zoom, behaviors usually reserved for close relationships – such as long strokes of direct gaze and faces seen up close – has suddenly become the way we interact with casual acquaintances, colleagues and even strangers,” he writes.
In a conference room, you can sit further from colleagues and break eye contact more often than during a video call, he says. Psychologists have found that staring at “physiological arousal” is what causes mating or struggles for our primal brains.
That’s normal in a conference room when you’re the presenter, but on Zoom everyone is stared at all the time, which, according to Bailenson, “effectively turns listeners into speakers and suffocates everyone with looks.”
He suggests doing away with the “Brady Bunch” format: participant squares and speakers stacked in a grid are just unnatural. Try shrinking the zoom window on your monitor to reduce the intense crowd of faces on your screen.
Another explanation why apps like Google Meet and Zoom are wiping us out: looking at our own faces all day long. Bailenson called the phenomenon an “ all day mirror ” – a phenomenon that is leading more people to turn to plastic surgery and botox – and referred to a 1988 study that forced men and women to watch a real-time video of themselves while they were doing a test. The study concluded that “the tendency to self-focus may lead women to become depressed.” So do yourself a favor and choose to “Hide Self View” while in Zoom.
Bailenson’s paper concludes that video calls literally put us in a box. Because anyone on the phone can see what everyone else is doing, it’s not professional – or socially acceptable – to fidget, yawn, stretch, or move outside of the virtual space we occupy on our screens.
We tend to overcompensate. Think, “nodding excessively for a few seconds” and “looking directly into the camera (as opposed to the faces on the screen) to try to make direct eye contact while speaking.” A 2019 study referenced in the paper found that video chaters tend to speak at a 15% higher volume than phone talkers.
Plus, Zoom ensures looks, kinks, concerns, and eyelids are lost in translation. During a meeting, you can see when a colleague casts another disapproving look. In a video call, where grids are jumbled differently for each user, an employee glancing at their calendar can be seen as a side-eye to another.
But now that the pandemic is raging, “video conferencing is an indispensable part of life,” says Bailenson. But it might not hurt to say it in an email instead.
“One of the causes of Zoom fatigue is simply that we have more meetings than face-to-face,” he says.