Understanding ‘Zoom fatigue’ and how to embrace the potential

“It can be really powerful… I love Zoom,” says Jeff Hancock, Harry and Norman Chandler professor of communications at Stanford University.

“It has allowed me to stay in touch with my family and friends in Canada that I literally can't go visit [and] I have my research team that I haven't seen in a year, but we've all managed to stay productive and relatively healthy, and Zoom and other video platforms are a huge part of staying connected and being social.”

However, there are downsides to the medium that can lead to “Zoom fatigue,” says Hancock, who co-lead a Zoom fatigue project with Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

In examining the psychological consequences of spending hours per day on these platforms, the study “Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue” in Technology, Mind and Behaviour outlines four possible explanations for Zoom fatigue: excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze; cognitive load; increased self-evaluation from staring at video of oneself; and constraints on physical mobility.

To that end, by looking at possible solutions, the researchers hope to “optimize the benefits by minimizing the costs and the harms,” says Hancock.

Intense eye contact

Normally, when people interact, eye contact “is very much like a dance,” says Hancock. That means if they’re in a small group or talking one on one, people look at each other but also look away.

“We're not used to having people staring at us all the time. And this is a situation we're calling now ‘hyper gaze’ — once you have a bunch of people that are on your screen in front of you, especially if you're in a large meeting, they all seem to be staring at you all the time, even if you're not the speaker,” he says.

“The reason that's important is it can feel like we're in a situation of fight or flight… It's either really intimate or really aggressive, and that raises our physiological awareness, and our physiological systems get engaged. And, over time, that can be really tiring.”

At an in-person meeting, people can look down or doodle, but there's a greater sense of being watched when there's a camera on you on Zoom, says Catherine Mondloch, a psychology professor and director of the Face Perception Lab at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont.

“When you're in these meetings where everybody's got their camera on, I think some of the fatigue comes from that sense of having to be attentive every moment,” she says. “You can set up Zoom so that you've got that speaker view, but if you set up with the gallery view, then nobody gets that downtime, those brief moments where you feel like it doesn't matter what your facial expression is or if your head’s down.”

Online meetings can also be problematic because people are looking at their screen, not their camera, she says.

“That’s one of the challenges that we all face in those meetings is getting past the experience of people not looking at us while they're speaking.”

But video has its benefits, says Mondloch.

“I like to see people's faces — it gives us a sense that we're together. And if you set up your screen nicely, you can pick up little changes, shifts in position where you can tell somebody's trying to say something and… let somebody into a conversation.”

On Zoom grids, faces are also bigger in your field of view than they are face-to-face. And while eye contact is important — for example, someone on stage lecturing to students — that can also be tiring, says Hancock.

“It's like a huge energy rush, but also draining,” he says. “If you're doing that for three, four or five hours in a day while you're sitting at home and you're not the speaker all the time, you're not psychologically ramped up to give that talk and get all that attention, then that's when it starts to be different.”

Cognitive overload, digital mirror

Another reason for the Zoom fatigue is the idea of managing nonverbal behaviour. When people meet in person, the way they make gestures as they speak is effortless. But when they’re on camera, they have to think more about their gestures and how they come across onscreen.

“What was once effortless is now effortful, and that's tiring,” says Hancock.

A third challenge? The selfie effect or “digital mirror” of Zoom calls where people see both themselves and the person they’re talking to.

“It's the equivalent of walking around and having a mirror right beside your friend’s or your colleague’s face, so now you're talking not only to your friend but also to a mirror,” he says. “It's got to be one of the strangest developments for human communication ever.”

While some self-awareness can be valuable — so people know they’re presenting well, for example — “constant self-awareness can increase anxiety and even lead to depression,” says Hancock.

A fourth concern involves the constraints to physical mobility. In-person and audio phone conversations allow people to walk around and move, but video calls require people to stay very close to the computer camera and sit in a limited frame.

New skills needed for new normal

The idea that Zoom or online communications are intrinsically problematic is inaccurate, says Alex Lindsay, head of operations at 090 Media in San Francisco.

“Once you have the skills to work around it and once you understand what you're looking at, it can be fun to do those kinds of things,” he says. “The fatigue that people are talking about is really, in my opinion, a discomfort that is driven from not understanding how to do these things.”

The challenge really is that many people were not prepared to use Zoom and similar platforms when the pandemic hit, so they got forced into it quickly and haven't adjusted, he says.

If people treat something as if it’s temporary, they don’t invest the time and effort into making it work. But people need to take this very seriously, says Lindsay.

“I don't think that we're going back to the way things were. I think that there's a large enough number of people that don't want to go back, that the chances of going back to the way the world used to be are very low. And, so, this is probably not a skill set that is going to become obsolete, even as the vaccine rolls out.”

Combatting Zoom fatigue

There are a few potential solutions to Zoom fatigue, says Bailenson in his study. For one, people can take Zoom out of the full-screen option and reduce the size of the Zoom window relative to the monitor to minimize face size. Also, they could use an external keyboard to sit further back from the screen and hide the self-view to avoid that distraction.

Another option is to turn the video off periodically during meetings to take an “audio-only” break.

But that could be problematic, says Lindsay.

“The people who move the conversation forward are the people who have video and audio on. You start turning it off and… you put yourself at a huge disadvantage of connecting to your client or your boss or your co-workers,” he says.

The core issue that should be addressed is the number and length of meetings, he says, citing Google as an example, which relies heavily on video for meetings but rarely schedules meetings over 25 minutes.

“This produces a more focused and productive conversation,” says Lindsay.

To combat Zoom fatigue, it’s important not to put the burden on individuals and to have institutions, companies and governments step up through training, investments and setting new norms, says Hancock.

“A year in, I think there's no reason not to be doing that.”

For instance, Citigroup has now banned face-to-face video conferencing on Fridays, he says.

“It's an example of an institution trying to help their employees, because if they're fatigued, they're cognitively loaded, they're going to be less happy and have lower well-being,” says Hancock. “You need to see investment... in new technologies that are going to support video conference since it's likely to be a part of the future of work.”