It’s time to turn it off and relax.
There is now scientific support for “Zoom Fatigue”, the term for the exhaustion felt by those who work from home and students who learn at a distance from a year of work, study and party by video call.
Spending days with colleagues is starting to get in the way of our brains, according to a researcher at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, whose findings were published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior.
“This piece underscores a theoretical explanation … why the current implementation of video conferencing is so exhausting,” writes Jeremy N. Bailenson in his paper, citing “nonverbal overload” as the root cause of video chat problems.
Bailenson argues that constant video conferencing distorts our feelings of intimacy and causes unnecessary stress.
“On Zoom, the behavior usually reserved for close relationships – such as long stretches of direct gaze of eyes and faces seen up close – has suddenly become the way we interact with casual acquaintances, co-workers and even strangers,” he writes. .
In a conference room, you can stay away from colleagues and break eye contact more often than you can on a video call, he says. Psychologists have found that being looked at as a “physiological challenge” suggests either mating or fighting our primary brain.
This is normal in a conference room if you are the person presenting, but on Zoom, everyone is constantly watched, which, says Bailenson, “effectively turns listeners into speakers and stifles everyone in the eye.” .
He suggests eliminating the “Brady Bunch” format: the squares of participants and speakers stacked in a grid are simply unnatural. Try shrinking the Zoom window on the monitor to reduce the intense audience of the faces on the screen.
Another explanation for why apps like Google Meet and Zoom take us away: we look at our own faces all day. Bailenson called the phenomenon a “mirror throughout the day” – a phenomenon that has led to more people resorting to plastic surgery and Botox – and referred to a 1988 study in which men and women were forced to watch a video. in real time while taking a test. The study concluded that “the tendency to focus on oneself could cause women to experience depression.” So do yourself a favor and opt for “Hide self-view” while activating Zoom.
Bailenson’s newspaper concludes that the video calls literally put us in a box. Because everyone on the call can see what others are doing, it is not professional – or socially acceptable – to shake, yawn, stretch, or move far outside the virtual space we occupy on our screens.
We tend to overcompensate. Think: “shaking your head a few extra seconds” and “looking directly into the room (as opposed to the faces on the screen) to try to make direct eye contact when talking.” A 2019 study referred to in the newspaper found that video chats tend to speak at a volume 15% higher than telephone speakers.
In addition, Zoom makes it so that the look, approval, worry and eyes are lost in translation. In a meeting, you can tell when a colleague gives another disapproving look. In a video call, in which the grids are mixed differently for each user, a colleague who takes a look at the calendar can be perceived as a side eye to another.
However, with the onset of the pandemic, “video conferencing is here to stay,” says Bailenson. But it wouldn’t hurt to say it in an email.
“Perhaps a Zoom fatigue factor is simply the fact that we take more meetings than we do face to face,” he says.