With many people now working and learning from home, Zoom has become a household name. It may have started out as an exciting new feature, but for some it has now become more of an exhausting chore. It turns out there's a name for the tiredness people feel after video meetings, and WGBH Morning Edition Host Joe Mathieu spoke with Laura Dudley, director of Northeastern University's applied behavior analysis programs to learn more about a phenomenon called "Zoom fatigue." The transcript below has been edited for clarity.
Joe Mathieu: I fell in love with Zoom like everyone else, and I do rely on it to this day. But you're telling us there's something very real. We call it "Zoom fatigue."
Laura Dudley: Yes. I think that we are all probably experiencing that, at least those of us who have been spending countless hours in online meetings. It doesn't have to be just, of course, across Zoom it can be across other platforms as well. I feel like Zoom is the one that we all tend to use, but for sure, we're all feeling this level of fatigue at the end of the day, if we were having multiple meetings across this platform.
Mathieu: Is it just the distance? And you're right, this could be Skype. We could be FaceTiming or anything, we've just all settled on Zoom for some reason, much to their benefit, apparently, on Wall Street. But is it the lack of in-person communication or is it just human nature — you're sick of doing the same thing every day?
Dudley: Well, I think there was this period of time where there was a novelty to using Zoom. We were all logging in to family reunions, business meetings, board meetings [and] birthday parties, laughing about 'isn't this kind of a fun and unique and novel way to be coming together as we're starting to self isolate'? But I think the novelty wore off pretty quickly. We got to the point where we were ready to turn our computers off at the end of the day and not look at them again for quite some time.
Mathieu: Yeah, that's true. And I start thinking, maybe it's just me, but it's because it's made us more productive. It's allowed us to connect with people in a way that, my gosh, we'd just be sitting here looking at the walls otherwise. Maybe you feel like we're looking at people directly, but we're not making eye contact?
Dudley: Yeah. So, I don't know if you've noticed this, but in order to provide another person with eye contact on Zoom you need to be looking at your camera while the other person is focused on your face. But then in order to receive eye contact, you need to be looking at their face while they're looking at their camera. So as you can see, there's really no way to achieve that sustained eye contact that we would normally have during a conversation.
Mathieu: So now we're getting to something. That's a problem. That's something that you're going to get sick of, or at least feel weird about after a while. But when it comes right down to it, Laura — and you're the expert here on our human behavior — aren't we all just looking at ourselves? Isn't that what we've all been doing for two months?
Dudley: I think you're absolutely right. Most of these platforms, when we're participating and our camera is on, we are seeing ourselves in the meeting. Now, that's not something that would happen during a face-to-face meeting. So it's sort of as if we were in a face-to-face meeting and someone was holding up a giant mirror in front of us. And that would be really strange, right? So then we would be allocating some of our effort towards monitoring how we look in the meeting, which is not something we would normally do [and] not something we would normally want to do.
So I think that that's part of the reason that we are so exhausted at the end of the meeting, because we're participating, we are looking at the other members of the meeting, but we're also monitoring, how am I looking in this meeting? How are people perceiving me in this meeting? And I just recently discovered this feature on the Zoom where you can actually hide your own self view. And I have to tell you, I'm really enjoying this function. And you really need to have a little bit of bravery here because what you're going to do if you use this function is to decide 'I don't care what I look like in this meeting', or 'I don't feel like I need to monitor what I look like in this meeting. I'm going to turn this off.' And I think if you use that function, you might find you're not quite as exhausted at the end of the meeting.
Mathieu: I'm guessing a lot of people can relate with this conversation right now, so that's a big one. How about raising your hand when you need to talk? If we were all in the same room, there would be body language, you might make a little bit of a sound to interrupt, but talking over each other and knowing when to speak has become a real issue, too.
Dudley: Oh, yeah. I've been in countless meetings where either we're all talking at the same time or else nobody's talking. I think that makes it a little bit awkward, and it can lead to a situation where people just sort of give up and stop talking, which is obviously not what you want in a meeting. You want participation from all the people who are there. And I think one of the reasons this is happening is just what you're describing. So in a face-to-face meeting, there are those subtle cues that tell us that someone's about to speak. And we even use those subtle cues. So we might lean a little bit forward in our seat, we might clearer throat, or we might even sort of raise our hand a bit to talk. And when we do that, others respond. They say, "Okay this person's about to speak," and so they don't speak. But they're so subtle that we're not even really aware that we're doing it. So those cues are are missing out of the equation when we're in an online meeting.
Mathieu: So bring it home for me, Laura. At some point we're gonna be back to work, I think, in an office somewhere. Are we ever going to act the same again?
Dudley: Gosh, I hope so. I think that once we get back to those face-to-face encounters, there may be some differences. We may find some differences. One of the things that I think is happening just in general with our interactions is that because we can't use those non-verbal cues, we are overcompensating in other ways. So we might find ourselves sort of emphasizing the tone of voice that we use or we might actually just verbally state what we're feeling or what we're about to do.
