Researchers identify four causes of “Zoom fatigue” and their simple solutions

Although more people are signing up on popular video chat platforms to connect with colleagues, family and friends during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford researchers have a warning for you: video calls are likely to tire you out.

Encouraged by the recent boom in video conferencing, Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founder of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) in communications, has explored the psychological effects of hours a day on these platforms. Just as ‘Google’ is something similar to any search on the internet, the term ‘Zooming’ has become ubiquitous and is a common verb to replace video conferencing. Virtual meetings have skyrocketed, with hundreds of millions taking place daily as social distancing protocols have physically disliked people.

In the first article by peer reviewers who systematically deconstruct Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective, published in the journal Technology, mind and behavior on February 23, Bailenson took the medium apart and judged Zoom on its individual technical aspects. He identified four consequences of lengthy video conversations that he said contribute to the feeling commonly known as ‘Zoom fatigue’.

Bailenson stressed that his goal is not to discredit any specific video conferencing platform – he appreciates and uses tools like Zoom on a regular basis – but to highlight how exhausting the current implementations of video conferencing technologies are and to propose interface changes, which is very simple to implement. Furthermore, he gives suggestions to consumers and organizations on how to utilize the current features on video conferencing to reduce fatigue.

“Video conferencing is a great thing for remote communication, but just think of the medium – just because you can use video, does not mean you have to do it,” Bailenson said.

Below are four primary reasons why people avoid fatigue, according to the study. Readers can also complete a questionnaire to see where they end up on the ZEF (Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue) scale.

Four reasons why

1) Excessive amounts of eye contact are very intense.

The amount of eye contact with which we engage in video chats, as well as the size of the faces on the screens, is unnatural.

In a normal meeting, people will look at the speaker, make notes, or look elsewhere. But on Zoom calls, everyone looks at everyone all the time. A listener is treated orally like a speaker, so even if you do not speak once in a meeting, you still look at faces that are staring at you. The amount of eye contact is dramatically increased. “Social anxiety about public speaking is one of the biggest phobias in our population,” Bailenson said. “When you stand there and everyone stares at you, it’s a stressful experience.”

Another source of stress is that depending on your monitor size and whether you are using an external monitor, faces on video conference calls may appear too large for convenience. ‘In general, if it’s a one-on-one conversation when you’re on video with colleagues or even strangers, you see their face at a size that simulates a personal space you normally experience when you’ intimate with someone, ‘Bailenson said.

When someone in real life is so close to ours, our brain interprets it as an intense situation that will lead to either mating or conflict. “What actually happens when you use Zoom for many, many hours is that you are in this hyper-excited state,” Bailenson said.

Solution: Until the platforms change their interface, Bailenson recommends taking Zoom out of the full screen option and reducing the size of the Zoom window compared to the monitor to reduce the face size, and to use an external keyboard to increase personal space bubble. between yourself and the grid.

2) Seeing yourself during real-time video chats is tiring.

Most video platforms show a square of what you look like on a camera during a conversation. But it’s unnatural, Bailenson said. “If someone was constantly chasing you with a mirror – so that while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving feedback, getting feedback, seeing yourself in a mirror, then it would just be crazy. No one would ever considered, ‘he added.

Bailenson cited studies that show that when you see a reflection of yourself, you are more critical of yourself. Many of us see ourselves on video chat for many hours every day. “It burdens us. It’s stressful. And there is a lot of research that shows that there are negative emotional consequences to seeing yourself in a mirror.”

Solution: Bailenson recommends that platforms change the standard practice of streaming the video to both themselves and others, when it is only to be sent to others. In the meantime, users should use the “hide self-esteem” button, which someone can access by clicking on their own photo, once they see that their face is properly framed in the video.

3) Video chats dramatically reduce our normal mobility.

Personal and audio conversations allow people to walk around and move around. But with video conferencing, most cameras have a specific field of view, which means that a person usually has to stay in the same place. Movement is restricted in ways that are not natural. “There is now a growing body of research that says that when people move, they perform cognitively better,” Bailenson said.

Solution: Bailenson recommends that people think more about the room in which they are video conferencing, where the camera is placed, and whether things like an external keyboard can create distance or flexibility. With an external camera further away from the screen, you can, for example, fit and sketch in virtual meetings, just like in real meetings. And of course, it’s a good rule of thumb to put groups off video regularly during meetings, just to rest yourself briefly.

4) The cognitive load is much higher in video chat.

Bailenson notes that non-verbal communication in regular face-to-face interaction is quite natural and that each of us makes and interprets gestures and non-verbal signs unconsciously. But in video calls, we have to work harder to send and receive signals.

In fact, Bailenson said, people took one of the most natural things in the world – a personal conversation – and turned it into something that many thought: ‘You need to make sure your head is framed in the middle of the video. If you want to show someone that you agree with them, you have to do an exaggerated nod or thumbs up. It adds cognitive burden when you use mental calories to communicate. ‘

Gestures can also mean different things in a video conference context. When someone looks at the side during a personal gathering, it means something completely different than someone on a video chat grid looking outside the screen at their child who has just walked into their home office.

Solution: Give yourself an “audio only” break during long meetings. “It’s not just turning off your camera to take a breather so as not to be verbally active, but also turning your body away from the screen,” Bailenson said, “so you don’t suffocate for a few minutes with gestures that are perceptually realistic but socially meaningless. ‘

Many organizations – including schools, large corporations, and government agencies – have reached out to Stanford communications researchers to better understand how to create best practices for their specific video conferencing and how to come up with institutional guidelines. Bailenson – with Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab; Géraldine Fauville, former postdoctoral researcher at the VHIL; Mufan Luo; postgraduate student at Stanford; and Anna Queiroz, postdoc at VHIL – responded by designing the Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue Scale, or ZEF Scale, to help measure how much fatigue people experience in the workplace from video conferencing.

The scale, outlined in a recent, not yet peer-reviewed article published on the preprint website SSRN, promotes research on how to measure fatigue from interpersonal technology, and what causes fatigue. The scale is a 15-item questionnaire, which is freely available, and has been tested in five separate studies with more than 500 participants over the past year. It raises questions about the person’s general fatigue, physical fatigue, social fatigue, emotional fatigue and motivational fatigue. Some sample questions include:

How exhausted do you feel after video conferencing? How irritated do your eyes feel after video conferencing? How much do you tend to avoid social situations after video conferencing? How emotionally drained do you feel after video conferencing? How often do you feel too tired to do other things after video conferencing?

According to Hancock, the results of the scale could help change the technology so that the stressors are reduced.

He notes that people have been here before. “When we first had elevators, we did not know if we had to stare at each other in that space. Recently, some of the questions raised questions about whether you should talk to the driver or not and whether you should get in the back. “seat or the passenger seat,” Hancock explained. “We had to develop ways to make it work for us. We are now engaged in video conferencing, and understanding the mechanisms will help us understand the optimal way of doing things for different institutions, different organizations and different types of meetings. “

“Hopefully our work will help uncover the roots of this problem and help people adjust their video conferencing practices to alleviate ‘Zoom fatigue’,” said Fauville, who is currently an assistant professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. , added. “It can also inform video conferencing platform designers to challenge and reconsider some of the paradigm on which video conferencing is based.”