Can't Stop Staring At Yourself in that Zoom Call? Blame Zoom Fatigue

This article was originally published on NBC's LX platform with permission to republish.

It’s become all too familiar these days: the dreaded video meeting. You log in to what feels like your hundredth Zoom meeting of the day. You do the obligatory greeting and wave. And then you mute your mic.

Then, for the next hour, you try to ignore the box in the corner that shows exactly how exhausted you think you look, wondering if your colleagues will notice the pile of laundry you forgot to stash away before turning on your cameras.

No matter how hard you try to pay attention to whatever your boss is presenting, your eyes will not cooperate and instead, you keep finding yourself watching... yourself.

And there’s a very good reason for this: we simply were not designed to communicate over webcam. When trying to connect with colleagues in yet another Zoom call in an endless stream of video meetings, we’re immediately at a disadvantage because so much of what our brains rely on for communication, body language, is restricted out of view.

“A lot of this is just automatic. It's sort of hard-wired in terms of how we interpret another person's body language or facial expressions. It happens automatically and it happens in real-time, which is one difference with video conferencing and Zoom is that there's oftentimes a delay in the transmission of our communications,” says Dr. Julie Ancis, professor of psychology and director of cyberpsychology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

“We're hearing things later. The other person is hearing what we're saying at a later time, and that really interferes with just the general flow timing of our conversations,” she says.

The awkward cadence of our conversations aren’t the only ways our Zoom meetings feel unnatural. It’s not often that we take business meetings from our bedrooms or kitchens, with our children or pets disrupting calls. And we’re doing all of this while we can see ourselves in real time.

To read the full story, visit https://www.lx.com/mental-health/staring-at-yourself-during-online-meetings-is-just-one-symptom-of-zoom-fatigue-and-youre-not-alone/33817/