Time to mute and unmute.
There is now scientific support for ‘Zoom Exhaustion’, the term for the exhaustion that those who work from home and students who study at a distance feel more than a year’s work, study and party via a video call .
According to a researcher from Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, whose findings were published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior, our days of looking at colleagues or peers are really starting to get mixed up with our brains.
“This piece outlines a theoretical explanation … why the current implementation of video conferencing is so exhausting,” Jeremy N. Bailenson wrote in his paper, citing “non-verbal overload” as the leading cause of video chat misery.
Bailenson argues that the constant video conferencing distorts our sense of intimacy and causes unnecessary tension.
“At Zoom, behaviors that are usually reserved for close relationships – such as long stretches of direct gaze and faces seen up close – are suddenly the way we deal with informal acquaintances, co-workers and even strangers,” he writes.
In a conference room, you can sit further away from colleagues and break eye contact more often than you can during a video call, he argues. Psychologists have found that staring causes a physiological arousal, suggesting that our primary brain is mating or fighting.
It’s normal in a conference room if you’re the person presenting, but in Zoom everyone is watched all the time, which, according to Bailenson, ‘effectively transforms listeners into speakers and stifles everyone with a glance.’
He suggests eliminating the “Brady Bunch” format: squares of participants and speakers stacked in a grid are simply unnatural. Try reducing the Zoom window on your monitor to reduce the intense faces on your screen.
Another explanation why apps like Google Measure and Zoom wipe us out: looking at our own faces all day. Bailenson called the phenomenon an “all-day mirror” – a phenomenon that has led more people to switch to plastic surgery and Botox – and referred to a 1988 study in which men and women were forced to watch a real-time video of themselves while taking a test. . The study concluded that ‘the tendency to self-focus women can lead to depression’. So do yourself a favor and select ‘Hide Self-Esteem’ while on Zoom.
Bailenson’s paper concludes that video calls literally put us in a box. Because everyone on the call can see what everyone is doing, it is not professional – or socially acceptable – to fiddle, yawn, stretch or move around much beyond the virtual space we occupy on our screens.
We tend to compensate. Think: “nod in an exaggerated way for a few extra seconds” and “look directly into the camera (as opposed to the faces on the screen) to try to make direct eye contact as you speak.” In a 2019 study referred to in the article, video chatters were found to tend to speak 15% louder than telephone callers.
Plus, Zoom makes it so that look, nod, concern and eye rolls are lost in the translation. In a meeting, you can see when one colleague disapproves of another. On a video call, where schedules for each user are mixed up differently, one employee looking at their calendar can be seen as a side-eye for another.
Yet, with the pandemic raging, ‘video conferencing is here to stay,’ “Bailenson said. But it would not hurt to say so in an email instead.
“Perhaps the manager of Zoom Fatigue is simply that we take more meetings than we would face-to-face,” he says.