These are the 4 ways Zoom meetings completely burn out your brain

In pre-pandemic times, it was likely that the daily meetings with colleagues were getting to you. Most meetings seem like they could be solved with an email or two, but everyone likes to be on the same page, right? So the pandemic starts last year and everything rolls over remotely.

In-person meetings pivot to virtual meetings where you’re staring intently at a brightly-lit laptop screen judging your colleagues’ homes or wondering if you look presentable enough to be considered work-appropriate on a call from home.

The transition was interesting in the beginning; there have been stories about mishaps on Zoom to a lawyer morphing his face to a cat during a virtual hearing. Those blips certainly serve for entertainment, but workers have been complaining about Zoom fatigue since the beginning of the pandemic.

The endless barrage of video meetings, FaceTime’s with family and friends, and other screen-staring engagements has workers feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. With workers slowly getting themselves integrated back into office settings, virtual meetings could still exist even with people present in the same building — and getting over Zoom fatigue isn’t going to be all that easy.

A new study by researchers at Stanford University dove into what Zoom fatigue does from a psychological perspective, finding that four aspects of video-conferencing contribute to the phenomenon.

The study, published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior, found that one of the main culprits of the virtual fatigue is the excessive amounts of close eye contact, which comes unnatural due to screens being right in front of people’s faces.

“Social anxiety of public speaking is one of the biggest phobias that exists in our population,” said Jeremy Bailenson, a professor and founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. “When you’re standing up there and everybody’s staring at you, that’s a stressful experience.”

The report said that in normal meetings people tend to be able to look at other things instead of solely the speaker, like taking notes or sending attention around the room, but on Zoom calls, the camera is constantly on you and listeners are treated as if they are speakers since you still appear on the screen.

“In general, for most setups, if it’s a one-on-one conversation when you’re with coworkers or even strangers on video, you’re seeing their face at a size which simulates a personal space that you normally experience when you’re with somebody intimately,” Bailenson explained.

The solution here is to reducing the size of the Zoom window or not making Zoom the entire window, while incorporating other devices like an external keyboard can create “personal space” from the call itself.

Another aspect of Zoom fatigue is how seeing yourself on the screen in real-time can be exhausting. Bailenson equated it to standing in front of a mirror while presenting in front of people.

“In the real world, if somebody was following you around with a mirror constantly – so that while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving feedback, getting feedback – you were seeing yourself in a mirror, that would just be crazy. No one would ever consider that,” he said.

Citing studies that have shown that people are more critical of themselves when seeing a reflection, he said that users can hide the self-view option so they don’t see that they appear on their own screen, but others can see them.

Bailenson listed two other reasons behind Zoom fatigue. Be sure to check out his findings here.