‘Zoom fatigue’ is a real thing now, according to science

Time to unmute and unwind.

There’s now scientific backing for “Zoom fatigue,” the term for the exhaustion that those working from home and students learning remotely alike feel from over a year of working, studying and partying via video call.

Spending our days gazing at colleagues or peers is starting to really mess with our brains, according to a researcher out of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, whose findings were published in the journal “Technology, Mind and Behavior.”

“This piece outlines a theoretical explanation … as to why the current implementation of videoconferencing is so exhausting,” writes Jeremy N. Bailenson in his paper, citing “nonverbal overload” as the main cause of video-chat woes.

Bailenson argues that the constant videoconferencing is skewing our sense of intimacy and causing unnecessary stress.

“On Zoom, behavior ordinarily reserved for close relationships — such as long stretches of direct eye gaze and faces seen close up — has suddenly become the way we interact with casual acquaintances, co-workers, and even strangers,” he writes.

In a conference room, you can sit further from colleagues, and break eye contact more often than you can on a video call, he argues. Psychologists have found that being stared at causes “physiological arousal” suggesting either mating or combat to our primal brains.

That’s normal in a conference room if you’re the person presenting, but on Zoom, everyone is being stared at all the time, which, argues Bailenson, “effectively transforms listeners into speakers and smothers everyone with eye gaze.”

He suggests doing away with the “Brady Bunch” format: Squares of participants and speakers stacked in a grid is just plain unnatural. Try shrinking the Zoom window on your monitor to lessen the intense audience of faces on your screen.

Another explanation for why apps such as Google Meet and Zoom wipe us out: looking at our own faces all day. Bailenson called the phenomenon an “all day mirror” — a phenomenon resulting in more people turning to plastic surgery and Botox — and referenced a past 1988 study where men and women were forced to watch a real-time video of themselves as they took a test. The study concluded that “the tendency to self-focus might prime women to experience depression.” So, do yourself a favor and opt to “Hide Self View” while on Zoom.

Bailenson’s paper concludes that video calls put us in a box, literally. Because everyone on the call can see what everyone else is doing, it’s not professional — or socially acceptable — to fidget, yawn, stretch or move around much outside of the virtual space we’re occupying on our screens.

We tend to overcompensate. Think: “nodding in an exaggerated way for a few extra seconds,” and “looking directly into the camera (as opposed to the faces on the screen) to try and make direct eye contact when speaking.” A 2019 study referenced in the paper found that video-chatters tend to speak at 15% higher volume than phone-talkers.

Plus, Zoom makes it so that looks, nods, concern and eye-rolls are lost in translation. In a meeting, you can tell when one colleague shoots another a disapproving look. On a video call, where grids are jumbled differently for each user, one co-worker glancing at their calendar can be perceived as side-eye to another.

Still, with the pandemic raging on, “videoconferencing is here to stay,” Bailenson says. But it wouldn’t hurt to, perhaps, say it in an email instead.

“Perhaps a driver of Zoom fatigue is simply that we are taking more meetings than we would be doing face-to-face,” he says.