Are you exhausted after a video chat? You might have ‘Zoom fatigue’
What’s the one item people might be using more than toilet paper during the coronavirus pandemic?
Zoom. It’s a communications platform like FaceTime, Skype or Google Hangouts that allows you to communicate via video calls with up to 1,000 people.
But users are exhausted from all the online birthday parties, happy hours, schooling, and family events that despite helping foster a sense of community during isolating times, are tiring brains like never before.
This exhaustion has been informally termed “zoom fatigue” or “zoom burnout.”
A professor of philosophy wrote in Medium that this burnout mostly serves as a reminder of how much everyone’s lives have changed and surfaces those deep worries about when everything will return to normal.
“Every video call to someone you wish you could see in person but can’t is a memento mori of a world that’s been shattered and can’t be revived,” Rochester Institute of Technology professor Evan Selinger wrote in the outlet. “People are struggling to politely opt out, to honor their feelings of burnout without upsetting the people they care about. After all, it’s hard to say you’re unavailable and can’t make an online appearance during a quarantine.”
Technology is also not always on our side and can glitch during video calls with loved ones, especially when your wireless connection is overwhelmed due to overuse.
“Glitchy calls where images freeze and the audio stops are taxing,” Selinger said. “But even when stability isn’t an issue and folks don’t have to repeat themselves, video calls can still wear us out.”
Another reason being the constant attention you might be paying to how you appear on screen, he added. “Becoming simultaneously subject and object can make you more self-conscious.”
“That’s an energy drain,” Selinger wrote.
Your battery also runs low when you have to guess what people mean because of the lack of nonverbal cues such as hand gestures and facial expressions that may be hard to read if your video is blurry or glitching, National Geographic reported.
“Since humans evolved as social animals, perceiving these cues comes naturally to most of us, takes little conscious effort to parse, and can lay the groundwork for emotional intimacy,” the outlet said.
“For somebody who’s really dependent on those nonverbal cues, it can be a big drain not to have them,” Andrew Franklin, an assistant professor of cyberpsychology at Virginia’s Norfolk State University, told National Geographic.
Screens with multiple boxes of faces “Brady Bunch-style” also challenge the brain’s central vision, the magazine said, “forcing it to decode so many people at once that no one comes through meaningfully, not even the speaker.”
The phenomenon is called continuous partial attention — the process of paying attention to multiple stimuli but at a superficial level, according to wikia.org.
This can also lead to a separate experience called computer vision syndrome, Business Insider said. Symptoms include eye strain, headaches, blurred vision and neck and back pain.
An estimated 58% of people who work with computers have expressed these symptoms, the outlet said.
Years of studies have pointed to blue light as the culprit. Blue light has a short wavelength, which means it has a lot of energy compared to other colors of light, according to a published 2015 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As a result, blue light has been linked to diminished brain activity, poor sleep quality and dull focus, the study said, and personal devices such as phones and laptops emit more of this light than any other.
Another study showed that some pre-teens who looked at a screen for over seven hours a day had a thinner brain cortex than those who spent less time on a screen, Business Insider said.
And with Zoom being used for just about everything from religious services to family game nights, the effects of blue light could be putting a damper on your energy levels, too.
Other reasons behind your zoom fatigue could be the fact that you’re worried about “opening chunks of our homes for others to view,” which can “trigger social worries,” according to Axios.
Video calls also make us feel like we’re having intense, direct eye contact with others, which can be draining, Axios said, and doesn’t actually happen when conversations are done in person.
It’s also pretty awkward.
