A year of Zoom Effects: Burnout, Eye contact & Staring At Yourself

According to a new study from Stanford researchers, the constant eye-straining Zoom calls are having a tangible effect on our brains. 

On Blind, the largest anonymous professional network, we ran a survey from 3.01-3.04 and asked over 2,300 users:

1. Are Zoom calls tiring you out?
2. Do you feel as if your coworkers give excessive eye contact during Zoom calls? 
3. Do you stare at yourself during Zoom calls? 

 According to data gathered by Blind, 77%of professionals are tired of Zoom calls. 100% of Nutanix, 85% of Microsoft, and 80% of Google professionals are tired from video calls.  

Nearly a quarter of professionals feel that their coworkers give them excessive eye contact during the video calls. Another 70% of professionals admit that they are just staring at themselves on Zoom calls.  

An Engineer on Blind shared, “I often feel exhausted after a 1-hour online meeting with more than 3 people in a way that a real-life one wouldn’t make me feel. We don’t have lots of long meetings but sometimes we meet with the whole team (8 people) for 1h-2h. What’s your experience in this regard? How do permanent remote workers or the ones who aspire to this status cope with Zoom fatigue?”

Another user on Blind shared “Has your firm implemented any policy or guidance to ease the “zoom fatigue” and prevent burn out from the blurred work-life balance? For example, ours just announced no meetings are to be held on Fridays.”

Investors are maybe feeling some Zoom fatigue, too. Shares of the company are down around 16% in the last 10 days after exploding 443% in 2020. Zoom reports Q4 earnings this week.”

The World Health Organization describes burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Three symptoms can help you recognize it: “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.”

Below are four primary reasons why video chats fatigue humans, according to the study.

1) Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense.

Both the amount of eye contact we engage in on video chats, as well as the size of faces on screens is unnatural.

In a normal meeting, people will variously be looking at the speaker, taking notes or looking elsewhere. But on Zoom calls, everyone is looking at everyone, all the time. A listener is treated nonverbally like a speaker, so even if you don’t speak once in a meeting, you are still looking at faces staring at you. The amount of eye contact is dramatically increased. “Social anxiety of public speaking is one of the biggest phobias that exist in our population,” Bailenson said. “When you’re standing up there and everybody’s staring at you, that’s a stressful experience.” 

2) Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing.

Most video platforms show a square of what you look like on camera during a chat. But that’s unnatural, Bailenson said. “In the real world, if somebody was following you around with a mirror constantly – so that while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving feedback, getting feedback – you were seeing yourself in a mirror, that would just be crazy. No one would ever consider that,” he added.

3) Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility.

In-person and audio phone conversations allow humans to walk around and move. But with videoconferencing, most cameras have a set field of view, meaning a person has to generally stay in the same spot. Movement is limited in ways that are not natural. “There’s a growing research now that says when people are moving, they’re performing better cognitively,” Bailenson said. 

4) The cognitive load is much higher in video chats.

Bailenson notes that in regular face-to-face interaction, nonverbal communication is quite natural and each of us naturally makes and interprets gestures and nonverbal cues subconsciously. But in video chats, we have to work harder to send and receive signals.

In effect, Bailenson said, humans have taken one of the most natural things in the world – an in-person conversation – and transformed it into something that involves a lot of thought: “You’ve got to make sure that your head is framed within the center of the video. If you want to show someone that you are agreeing with them, you have to do an exaggerated nod or put your thumbs up. That adds cognitive load as you’re using mental calories in order to communicate.”

Solution: During long stretches of meetings, give yourself an “audio-only” break. “This is not simply you turning off your camera to take a break from having to be nonverbally active, but also turning your body away from the screen,” Bailenson said, “so that for a few minutes you are not smothered with gestures that are perceptually realistic but socially meaningless.”