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Experts are starting to look at why video conferences leave us so fatigued and what we can do to improve the experience
Has anyone else found Zoom meetings hard going? My longest regular meeting at present is two hours, but it is not uncommon for this to be bookended with two one-and-a-half hour calls. After five hours of more or less straight video interaction, I feel a definite zombie-like state coming over me. I call it ‘Zoomitis’. And, in fairness, I should not just name check Zoom – Webex and Microsoft Teams are equally tiring.
So I was not in the least bit surprised to see Stanford University researchers warning that video calls are tiring us out.
Communications Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), examined the psychological consequences of spending hours per day on these platforms. In a peer-reviewed article that systematically deconstructs Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective, Bailenson has identified four consequences of prolonged video chats (with accompanying solutions) that he says contribute to the feeling commonly known as “Zoom fatigue”. Here are the reasons:
“That adds cognitive load as you’re using mental calories in order to communicate,” Bailenson explains. As a solution, he suggests that during long stretches of meetings, we give ourselves an “audio-only” break. Don’t just turn off your camera to take a break from having to be non-verbally active, but also turn your body away from the screen. This stops us feeling smothered with gestures that are perceptually realistic, but socially meaningless.
“Videoconferencing is a good thing for remote communication, but just think about the medium – just because you can use video doesn’t mean you have to,” Bailenson told Stanford News. It looks like videoconferencing is with us for the long haul. I hope the tips above help make it a more bearable experience for you.
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