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Have you noticed that lately we have become more tired of communicating with others? Even talking to those closest to you can quickly tire you out. Why is this happening, is it related to the pandemic and are we okay?
Recently, everyday communication takes us more energy than before. Moreover, this happens with people of different ages — both twenty-year-olds and those who have exchanged their fifth decade. This is evidenced by numerous posts on social networks, responses from colleagues and acquaintances, letters to the editors of Psychologies. What is it connected with?
By answering each such request separately, you can start talking about the individual characteristics of a person. You can find reasons why specifically he no longer wants, as before, to conduct vigorous correspondence in WhatsApp or regularly call up his girlfriend. Everyone has their own stress factors: work, study, conflict with a loved one or even an age crisis.
However, if you collect individual requests into a single picture, then a certain trend is revealed.
We have become faster and stronger tired of communication
But why now? What reasons, besides personal ones, can affect us all? And is it worth worrying about this? Psychotherapist Anna Reznikova helps to understand this:
“Recently, among the requests that clients come to therapy with, there is an increasing frequency of this: “I seem to be developing social phobia — recently I have lost the desire to communicate with people.”. For many, this is really scary, because we are all social beings, and few of us are actually social phobes. I always ask the question: “What, in your opinion, could be the reason?” In response, almost everyone shrug their shoulders and usually say that everything is fine: no one quarreled with anyone, just a strong fatigue, and then there is communication, which seems to take the last strength «.
Burnout in communication
“I seem impolite to everyone, but I no longer have enough answers in messengers. Calling up is all the more stressful, but it’s easier to tune in once and talk for 10 minutes than to constantly switch to correspondence during the day. It used to be easy, in between times, ”- Elena, 45 years old
“The feeling that post-COVID fatigue has spread to the sphere of communication. Because I seem to want to communicate, but as soon as I start, the “battery” immediately drops to zero. It’s like I’m unloading wagons, and not listening to a person, ”- Sabina, 28 years old
Indeed, as strange as it may sound, many of us seem to have burned out in the field of communication. I just want peace, quiet and solitude. Someone sins on the «remote» («wild» we are at home), someone — on an overabundance of information.
There are really many reasons, and all of them strongly depend on the person himself, but there is still one common one, the psychologist believes. “The realities of modern life are such that we have to constantly communicate with neighbors, colleagues, friends, relatives. To paraphrase one of my clients, we can say that we are constantly in a “communications bank” from which we cannot get out because the lid is tightly closed.
And it seems that this has always been the case, but we seem to have noticed and started talking about it as loudly as possible only now. And, probably, we can say thank you for this, including the pandemic. After all, before we, thanks to covid, turned out to be the most active participants in numerous changes, only the lazy did not tell us how important networking is, how bad it is to be an introvert, and that without communication one cannot become successful.
This is true in many professions. And in general, sociable people are perceived as more friendly, open and helpful. True, as always, there is one «but».
Even the most sociable person has the right to get tired of this communication.
Especially when worries about life and health (one’s own and loved ones), numerous news about the pandemic, difficulties with distinguishing work and home life due to “remote work” are added to it. What can we say about those who, in principle, do not tend to have a large amount of communication and who had to make an effort on themselves in order to comply with everything stated above!
External events and news flow
“At some point I realized that I stopped reading and even watching news and TV shows — I can’t. I thought I was working too hard. But with the same workload at a distance, when there is no constant small-scale communication, it’s easier for me. I am not alone, I have always loved meetings, heart-to-heart conversations. Now I also love — but with the closest and not for long. Then I get tired,” Olga, 41 years old
«In principle, we are constantly tired, and this is absolutely normal, says Anna Reznikova. — To the standard and familiar to everyone moral and physical fatigue associated with work, fatigue is added from everything that happens around us. The pandemic, worries about health and well-being, numerous post-COVID symptoms — this and much more takes away our resource, makes us refuse to communicate. And now political, economic events that add even more anxiety…
Add a large amount of news (most often absolutely useless, but adding emotional tension to us) — and one gets the feeling that we are starting to drown under all this. As a result of a long psycho-emotional stress, which leads to the exhaustion of the nervous system, a person becomes indifferent. There are no communication resources. And I want only one thing — to quickly put on a life jacket in the form of silence and loneliness».
Microcontacts
And if everything is clear with fatigue indicators, then many people have questions and wonder about social networks and microcontacts: why do they have such a strong influence on our unwillingness to communicate with people?
“My work largely consists of correspondence in chat rooms, by e-mail, on Facebook — (an extremist organization banned in Russia) sometimes in one hour I get to talk with 10-15 people in 3-4 different instant messengers,” writes Sergey, editor-in-chief of the information portal. — This process is so tight and unpredictable that sometimes I even start working an hour or two earlier than all my colleagues on purpose, in order to have time to do something that requires immersion in the morning.
This pace of communication leads to the fact that the sense of time is lost.
So you answered the first message in Telegram, so you were asked about something else — and three hours of work are behind you. A day passes, you get tired, your brain is overloaded, and if you ask yourself the question: “What did I do today?” — then it is far from always possible to find a specific answer to it. That’s why I try, like Baron Munchausen, to plan one feat for every morning, before the start of the communication wave. Close some big task or realize some idea.
The problem with such microcommunications is that each of them almost always requires the adoption of some kind of microdecisions. And the brain does not care whether it takes a “micro” or “macro” decision: the resource is spent in the same way. As a result, in the evening it also happens that a simple choice of what to eat for dinner turns out to be too difficult.
The number of messages we receive every day is in the hundreds, comments Anna Reznikova. This includes numerous work, personal, school, «maternal», family and God knows what other chats, constant correspondence with colleagues and partners in various instant messengers, social networks, work and personal email… All this requires our prompt solutions. This is such a dense and viscous process that in the end there is a persistent feeling that although we receive an incredible amount of information, our performance remains almost at zero.
Social networks and information noise
The same goes for social media. Facebook (an extremist organization banned in Russia), Telegram, VK, Odnoklassniki, Instagram… (an extremist organization banned in Russia) On the one hand, this is great: we are always aware of everything that is happening now not only in the world, but also with our neighbor. However, on the other hand, the amount of information that we receive every minute, just by opening a page on a social network, makes us choke. It is not for nothing that the term “information noise” stands out among the most popular expressions in recent years.
Information noise is the unfiltered stream of unnecessary information that we encounter every day. We cannot analyze everything that we perceive, and it seems that we even get used to such a life, but this information flow takes away our strength and at the same time brings us almost nothing important.
What to do?
Understand that everything is wrong with you, and give yourself time to rest. Try to explain to your relatives and friends that you are tired and you need to be alone with yourself for a while, to recover.
Analyze your day, look at what you spend the most energy on and what can now be reduced or completely removed from your life. For example, reduce the time spent on social networks outside of work, temporarily delete or at least ignore those chats and groups that are not particularly relevant now, cut down on long conversations with colleagues about nothing over a cup of coffee.
Try to prioritize your affairs and work and do what is really important at the moment.
Set aside time for yourself that you will spend alone with yourself without the phone, TV, radio, newspapers and people. During this period, you can do whatever you want: lie down, play with your pet, read a book, walk, play sports, cross-stitch … The most important thing is to remember that this time is only for you and your recovery.
Sleep not 4-5 hours, but 8-10 hours a day, take a break from everyone and everything, go on vacation, get out into nature or just go outside alone. Do whatever it takes to help you recover.
Without a twinge of conscience, say «no» to those from whom you get tired the most. Perhaps this is a colleague or parents in your child’s school chat who once again want to buy something.
Ask for help, delegate what you can — unload yourself as much as possible.
And most importantly, remember that fatigue from communicating with people is a completely normal condition that each of us can experience.