Who hasn’t felt completely drained after logging out of a virtual meeting on zoom or teams?
A lot of people lately are dealing with Zoom fatigue (also called virtual fatigue). It refers to the exhaustion we feel after any kind of video call or conference. Even if a person is already plugged into modern technology, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought an entirely new meaning to the term “digital world”.
There are definite benefits to tools like Zoom, Skype, and FaceTime, from allowing people to safely connect face-to-face to making certain jobs more accessible for those with chronic health conditions. However, as with most good things, there’s always a cost and a compromise.
To understand this new fatigue that affects more than 300 million daily participants of virtual meetings, experts representing various disciplines including business, acoustics, and social sciences have contributed their explanations.
What could be the psychological explanation of Zoom fatigue?
We can start the exploration by revisiting the process of mental fatigue. A very important psychological component of fatigue is the rewards-costs exchange that happens in our minds unconsciously. Even the little decisions, such as pressing the “Enter” or even “Backspace” buttons or erasing a word already typed, are made based on these unconscious estimates to maximize reward (time) over cost (effort).
Work-based burnout is for people working in service-based careers. On top of the usual work-related stress, the pandemic has affected everyone’s mental health to go down the hill. And yet, most of us are expected to continue working as if nothing has happened. The pandemic has affected many lives.
Key signs of burnout can also include:
• Forgetfulness and difficulty concentrating
• Frustration and irritability with co-workers
• Physical trusted source symptoms, like muscle tension, pain, fatigue, and insomnia
• Difficulty maintaining relationships and being present with loved ones
Why virtual meetings are so exhausting?
It’s not just our imagination. Several factors make virtual meetings legitimately tiring. One has to work harder to read people’s facial expressions and decode tone through a computer screen. Even though this isn’t something one consciously realizes, it has been proven that most people need more effort to have conversations through a virtual platform than they do in real life.
“When engaging in such interaction, folks need to create the illusion of eye contact while also mentally processing their verbal communication,” Social Worker Jagoo says.
As far as technology has come, there’s also still a slight delay for verbal responses during virtual connections. This can strain our ability to interpret the words of the person we’re talking with.
Fortunately, there are things one can do to take back some control and not feel so drained after a virtual meeting. There are always going to be meetings that one can’t get out of attending, but there are also ones that can most definitely be passed!
If one feels that they are starting to get lost or tuning out, a simple statement such as “I’m going to turn off my video because it makes it easier for me to listen” can go a long way.
There can be a lot of pressure to commit to every meeting and task due to the false equivalence of being at home meaning “not working,” but we all know that’s not the case.
If one can have any control over the meetings’ scheduling, we should aim to figure out what works best bearing in mind that the main issue here is our mental health. Maybe stacking all the mandatory Zoom meetings at the beginning of the week works best. Or, maybe one would prefer spreading them throughout the week. That way, no singular day feels overloaded. One could also create boundaries where your work calendar is unavailable for meetings until after 12.00 noontime. These are all personal choices that you would have to make. Make sure to take advantage of the little things you have more control over now that the work requires less mobility!
To conclude, work-related burnout is a very common issue. An ongoing global health crisis certainly doesn’t help things and virtual meetings are likely here to stay, so consider ways that you can keep up with your work and center your wellness. If you’re a manager or run your own business, you can help your employees by extending some wellness tips to them. If you are a teacher, you should take this a little bit more into consideration and always remember to keep the lines of communication open, and be willing to be flexible in your expectations.
Whoever you are, and whatever you do, remember to always prioritize your wellbeing and specifically, your mental health!
