Combating Zoom Fatigue

Creating Consistency and Healthy Bodies in the Comfort of Your Own Home: Part One

By Elizabeth Pongo

In this two-part series we’ll explore the impact of video conferencing on workplace wellness; how we as individuals can set up our environment to maintain our health and fitness; and what distinctions can be made between the benefits of working out in a gym, as compared to working out at home online.

According to Global Workplace Analytics it is estimated that 56% of the workforce can work from home, and that after the Covid-19 pandemic 25-30% of the workforce will continue to work from home one or more days per week.  US Companies can save over $500B a year with remote workers, or roughly $11,000 per year per employee, and employees can gain back 14 days of the year that would otherwise be enmeshed in commuting to work. 

With all this working from home, what are professionals experiencing in terms of health and fitness?  Many people complain of zoom fatigue, getting less activity, and being seated more often. This type of social isolation combined with being sedentary for prolonged periods of time while videoconferencing can lead to burnout, increased anxiety, and depression.

How do we counteract the impact of all of the videoconferencing? Burnout is expensive for employers and detrimental to the lives of mothers, fathers, and busy go-getters who would like to be “living their best lives.” 

Just as it is the case in every wellness journey, there is no silver bullet when it comes to getting into great shape. Developing lean muscle fiber, improving balance and coordination, and training our bodies to function efficiently alleviates pain and functions as preventative medicine.  Proper exercise as prescribed by a physical therapist or certified personal trainer must be administered consistently, over time, and with a strategy in place to ensure that the individual continues the practice of moving their human body enough to be healthy in perpetuity. 

And whereas some workers are resigned to navigating their way in and out of the medical community to get pills for heart disease and surgeries for worn out joints and herniated discs, others are not. Western medicine is expensive, and health insurance premiums rise each and every year. Using doctors to fix medical conditions is much more painful and complicated than preventing the chronic conditions from flaring up in the first place.

As such, the responsibilites of creating a healthy working environment that alleviates the risk of chronic pain and restores our sense of vitality not only belong to the individual, but also the employer.

Employers are reaching out to Universities like Stanford to find out how to protect their workers’ wellness. In light of the evidence that zoom fatigue is real, how do employers create best practices and institutional guidelines? 

In the article titled “Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes,” Vignesh Ramachandran compiles information gathered by Professor Jeremy Bailenson. As the founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), Jeremy examined the psychological consequences of spending hours per day on these platforms. 

In the first peer-reviewed article that systematically deconstructs Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective, published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior on Feb. 23, Bailenson has taken the medium apart and assessed Zoom on its individual technical aspects. He has identified four consequences of prolonged video chats that he says contribute to the feeling commonly known as “Zoom fatigue.”

He notes that humans have been here before. “When we first had elevators, we didn’t know whether we should stare at each other or not in that space,” Hancock explained. “We had to evolve ways to make it work for us. We’re in that era now with videoconferencing, and understanding the mechanisms will help us understand the optimal way to do things for different settings, different organizations and different kinds of meetings.”

These four simple fixes address the neurological impact of prolonged video chats and offer solutions. Here are the reasons why we experience Zoom fatigue, and how to counteract the result. 

PROBLEM 1: Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact can feel intense.

TRY THIS. Take Zoom out of full-screen mode. Reduce the size of the Zoom window relative to the monitor to minimize face size. Using an external keyboard will also help by providing an increase in the personal space bubble between yourself and the grid on the screen. 

PROBLEM 2: Seeing our own faces in real time and constantly on video chats is fatiguing.

TRY THIS. After you see that your face is framed properly on the screen, use the “hide self-view”  button so that you’re not processing information about yourself and others in double-time. 

PROBLEM 3: Our usual activities, such as walking to work or going to meetings, are drastically reduced due to videoconferencing.

TRY THIS. Think about the room that you are videoconferencing in. How is the camera positioned? Is it possible to place an external keyboard away from the camera so as to create space and flexibility? An external camera that is farther away from your screen (than, say, the camera in a laptop) can allow you the room you need to pace, stand up, doodle- ie, behaviors that people feel more liberty to engage in during meetings in real life. Too, turning your camera off at times can allow you to move around without distracting the group. 

PROBLEM 4: When video chatting, the cognitive load is much higher.

TRY THIS. During a long stretch of videoconference meetings, give yourself ‘audio only’ breaks where you are listening to the meeting, but you turn the camera off, so that you do not need to be nonverbally active. Turning your body away from your screen provides you with the needed knowledge that all of your gestures and facial expressions are unnecessary to be co-working effectively. 

During each period of our lives that humans experience great tragedy, there are also innovations in society. Be it the elevator, telephone, or radio, our ways of traveling through this world and interacting with one another will constantly change and evolve. In order to take good care of our bodies and our neighbors, we must learn to adapt, together.

Find out what makes Pongo Power virtual personal training so effective: book your free Fitness Assessment today.