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During remote communication, our brain is forced to decode a large amount of information at the same time, and the body often remains motionless – this is unnatural. Scientists suggest ways to minimize burnout factors
Have you ever counted how many hours a week you spend on video calls with colleagues, family members and friends? During the coronavirus pandemic, this format of communication has become commonplace for millions of people. Indeed, it is convenient – you do not have to leave the house once again and waste time on the road.
It is likely that the trend will only intensify. According to the Zoom Future of Work 2022 survey, the number of employees who are ready to stay on “remote” has almost doubled in a year. And the RAFI analytical center calculated that on average today our country spends 5 hours a day behind the screens of computers and smartphones, solving work tasks, and spend another 3 hours on personal matters.
What is zoom fatigue
During the mass transition to remote work, without suspecting it, we became participants in an informal experiment. At one point, all social interactions were reduced to the same unnatural grid of disembodied faces, where the main thing is to look at people and inadvertently interrupt them, writes the BBC.
In 2020, the term Zoom fatigue appears in research at the intersection of the humanities and computer sciences. — complex living fatigue from videoconferencing. In this case, we are talking about interaction not only through Zoom, which was more popular, but also through similar services: Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Messenger Rooms, FaceTime and others.
One of the features of distance communication is that it is extremely difficult for its participants to read the non-verbal signs that the interlocutor gives. Susan Bloom, an anthropology professor at the University of Notre Dame, talks about disruption in the rhythm of communication. Everything is important in communication – posture, gaze, head turn, breathing and simultaneous laughter of the speakers. And the dead silence in Zoom is decidedly different from the ringing silence during a live dialogue.
“All the communicative signs that bodily people rely on are thinned, flattened, made more laborious or completely impossible. But we still interpret them.”
Zoom fatigue can be accompanied by the following symptoms:
- Feeling tense, exhausted, or restless after a meeting.
- Desire to spend more time alone after the conversation ends.
- Decreased performance, difficulty with the performance of the usual work duties.
- Regular postponement / cancellation of video conferences and the desire to hide the video.
- Discomfort in the eyes after a long look at the screen.
Who is affected by burnout
Most often, Zoom burnout symptoms are experienced by those who are forced to hold several online meetings every day: school teachers, university professors, office workers, consultants. There is also a relationship with the temperament of the individual, for example, introverts may feel stress more than extroverts.
However, for some people with autism spectrum disorders, the transition to video calls has become more of a boon. According to Claude Norman of the University of Quebec, pauses in conversation due to program freezes helped them better understand when to start a conversation, while in ordinary life they had difficulty with this.
What Causes Burnout
The director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab, communication professor Jeremy Bailenson, identified several reasons for Zoom fatigue:
- Too much eye contact
During video conferences, everyone is constantly looking at each other, and not just at the speaker. Feeling the permanent gaze of others on us, we feel anxiety. In addition, the faces on the screen look larger than in real life, which creates a feeling of excessively close contact and is regarded as an invasion of personal space.
- The need to constantly see yourself during a call
Most platforms show how we look from the outside during a conversation – and this is unnatural, the scientist says. Many people have problems with self-esteem because of this. Imagine that in real life someone was talking to you all the time with a mirror in their hands, you can really go crazy from this.
- Limited mobility
As a rule, during online meetings, we have to sit in the same place so as not to fall out of the camera’s field of view. This reduces productivity and leads to overwork. At the same time, according to a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, replacing 30 minutes of sitting with physical activity can reduce the risk of early death by a third.
- Increased cognitive load
In essence, Beilenson believes, people have turned one of the most understandable things in the world, a personal conversation, into something that requires a lot of thought. You have to expend mental calories to maintain contact. For example, additional nodding or raising a finger up to express agreement, or conjecturing non-verbal signals of the interlocutor, because we see only his head.
Other researchers, such as Janine Hacker, have noticed another feature of video calls that can affect burnout is the blurring of boundaries between professional activity and personal life. So, not everyone is ready to let their colleagues into their home, albeit virtually, and show their household members or pets.
In addition, in the “incorporeal” space of the virtual world, we cease to be aware of our own boundaries and do not understand where they are violated by others. Anastasia Isayeva, lecturer at the Department of Personality Psychology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, writes about reduced physicality in distance communication: “We do not share a single subject-figurative space, but what we have in common is a nowhere localized, temporarily organized and often unprotected virtual space. We are in no way present in it with our body, and the other person is given to us in his very reduced physicality – in the form of a “digital mask”.
And research by psychophysiologists has shown that live face-to-face interaction activates the reward area of the brain much more than online meetings. This means that it is much more pleasant for us to communicate without an intermediary in the form of a screen. In addition, the inevitable sound delay and the lack of direct eye-to-eye contact have a negative effect.
How to deal with the problem
If back in 2012 the developers of Zoom had been told that the name of their company would become a household name and scientists would closely study the phenomenon of Zoom fatigue, hardly anyone would have believed it.
Today, the most popular video conferencing service is admitting that burn-in exists, but it’s not Zoom’s fault, you just need to take breaks from the screen.
Psychologists give more specific recommendations:
- Do not video conference every day and set time limits, such as no more than 30-50 minutes.
- If you realize that there is no point in continuing the meeting, end it.
- Use a Bluetooth headset to get some movement, and an external webcam and keyboard for more flexibility.
- Feel free to turn off the camera.
- Ask colleagues to remove unnecessary irritants and close unnecessary tabs yourself.
- Use alternative means of communication – it may make sense to send a message, write a letter or make a 5-minute phone call.
Scientists at Stanford University have developed a scale that helps determine the level of video call fatigue. This is a test of 15 questions and it will not hurt anyone to ask themselves.
Be that as it may, the world will never be the same again, Zoom has firmly entered our lives, like masks and antiseptics. Our task is to properly adapt to technology and minimize possible negative consequences. When elevators appeared, people also did not know how to behave and where to look, but they adapted.
“I feel like Zoom is the hammer for everything right now,” says Hancock, founder of the Stanford University Social Networking Lab. Let’s not use a hammer. Not everything is a nail.”