Zoom Burnout Is Real
By: Angela Lashbrook
Tags: Work, Microprocessing, Remote Work, Digital Life, Burnout

It is a time of great uncertainty.

Many of us are asking life-or-death questions, like: “Will I die if I open a window?” (Answer: No. Please open your windows.) But there are also little ones, like: “How do I tell my friend to stop inviting me to five video-call happy hours every week?”

“Zoom gives me crazy anxiety and the same social pressure I would feel being invited to a party,” says Dani, a marketing manager based in Cleveland, who requested that only her first name be used to protect her workplace privacy. “I have to do Zoom calls all day for work. I cannot socialize that way right now.”

Dani’s anxiety mirrors that of countless others currently battling an onslaught of Zoom calls, digital events, and online happy hours. “I’m in 3 different Slacks, 4 different Discords, in countless Zoom Happy Hours, and even more virtual events. I can’t wait until this pandemic is over so I can disconnect,” a community manager based in Ohio tweeted. “1) people assume u can do more meetings than u did before 2) u don’t move btwn them,” tweeted a psychiatrist based in Missouri, in response to a journalist’s assertion that “Zoom burnout is real.”

Zoom burnout and Zoom FOMO are only a couple of the issues people face as they shift their social lives from meeting over martinis at the neighborhood bar to meeting over oversize glasses of wine on a video call. From the awkwardness and anxiety of staring at the supposed flaws in your own face, to not knowing when to cut a call short when you don’t technically have anywhere else to be, our new social lives are lawless, with few guidelines to let us know how to navigate difficult situations for which we have no prior blueprints.

Social contact right now is more important than ever, but it’s okay to feel stressed out and want to avoid what seems like little more than new venues for anxiety. While you should make an occasional effort to get some kind of social interaction with friends and family, you shouldn’t feel like you need to be accepting every invitation that comes your way. Here’s how to wiggle out of unwanted invites, battle Zoom FOMO, and overcome other small anxieties — because if we’re going to be spending a foreseeable future of Friday nights via video-call cocktail hours, we need to figure out the proper etiquette.

I’m really popular, and it’s stressing me out. How can I politely decline some of my many Zoom invitations?

First of all: condolences.

Seriously, though, if I had to Zoom more than once or twice a week I would absolutely burn out, so I feel your pain. There’s also the simple issue that video calls can be more emotionally exhausting than a regular hangout, according to multiple psychologists I talked to for this piece.

“With Zoom or FaceTime, you can’t rely on body language for communication,” says Jamie Aten, a psychologist and an associate professor of humanitarian disaster leadership at Wheaton College in Illinois. “For those with social anxiety, Zoom or FaceTime makes it harder to draw boundaries. People get to see into your environmental context, it becomes unclear when ‘socializing’ should end, and certain social cues that are easily read in real life can be harder to read virtually.”

When we’re already forced to conduct our work life via the same means, it’s perfectly reasonable to become overwhelmed when suddenly your entire social circle thinks you’re 100% available all the time to hop on Zoom or Houseparty.

“With no delineation of work and home, most people I know are on calls all day,” says Reema Mitra, a brand strategist based in New York. “On the weekends, I am exhausted from all the calls, so I don’t want to use more screens to see friends, and overall that makes me sad.”

This can be difficult to explain to friends with different social burnout thresholds, especially since we’re all locked up inside and don’t exactly have dinners, concerts, and parties to attend that we can use as excuses. Mitra tells me that she connects with most of her friends one-on-one via phone calls, so that by the time Friday rolls around and it’s time for a virtual happy hour, she’s a little less burnt out by video.

Victoria Turk, the author of the book Kill Reply All: A Modern Guide to Online Etiquette, From Social Media to Work to Love, says the occasional white lie about your schedule is fine. “I’ve noticed a few people declining on the basis they have a ‘Zoom clash’ — which may be real or not, but it’s a good excuse if you don’t want to just straight up say you’re not interested,” she says. “A little white lie here or there to save someone’s feelings is fine etiquette by me.” Still, with friends, she recommends a more honest approach. “With close friends, of course, you should be able to simply say you’re tired or have other plans (that sourdough starter won’t feed itself!), without it being a big deal.”

Steven Petrow, an etiquette expert who has written four books about civility and manners, agrees that in many cases, honesty is the best policy. “What are the lessons of all this? One of them, I think, is to be more authentic, to be more real,” he says. “It’s perfectly fine to say if you don’t want to join in a Zoom cocktail party, that you’re not feeling up for today.”

Scheduling yourself non-negotiable “Zoom time” can also ensure you’re not getting wrangled into video calls you don’t have the energy for. Blocking out a couple of hours a week — say, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Saturdays — can help keep your calendar from getting overloaded, and can also provide you with a good out if you’re not in the mood. “I’d love to chat, but to avoid excess screen time, I’ve been limiting my video call time to a few hours a week. Are you around on Tuesday evening?” Not exactly easy-peasy — saying no rarely is — but it provides a little structure and certainty to a calendar that can look depressingly empty and, as a result, make it appear like you’re available at any time for any reason.

“With no delineation of work and home, most people I know are on calls all day.”

Are video calls really even worth it?

Few if any studies have investigated how well video calls and other forms of online socializing act as a proxy for real-life social contact during times of quarantine, though the impact of isolation on one’s mental health has been relatively well documented.

The best comparison might be to seniors living in nursing homes, who tragically are often hungry for social connection, and have too little contact with the outside world. A small 2020 study in the medical journal BMC Geriatrics found that nursing home residents experienced less loneliness, more vitality, and even less sensitivity to pain after connecting with family members once a week for six months via video call. A larger study, from 2011, had nursing home residents in Taiwan engage in at least one five-minute video call a week for three months. The experiment had a positive long-term effect on the residents’ depression symptoms and loneliness, even a year later.

Other studies have shown the negative health effects; one 2015 meta-analytic review found that social isolation is comparable to other risk factors for mortality. Right now, though, our options to overcome isolation are severely limited. For the next month, maybe two, our closest physical companions might be our sourdough starters, which makes it all the more important that we maintain some form of contact with our friends and family.

Can’t I just call people on the phone instead?

You definitely can — any contact is better than none. Video calls are a particularly demanding form of connection, and if you just can’t do it as often as people wish you could, it’s okay. “In real life, when we’re hanging out with friends, we don’t feel the same pressure to ‘perform socially’ as we do on Zoom or FaceTime,” says Suzanne Degges-White, a professor of counseling at Northern Illinois University. “As one colleague puts it, ‘Wearing that “happy girl” mask wears me out during unit meetings!’”

Still, research shows that seeing someone’s face has more of an impact on your sense of isolation than just hearing their voice. So if you can push yourself to participate in a Zoom call every once in a while, you should. “Give this new type of communication a chance, especially if you’re feeling isolated or lonely,” says Susan Biali Haas, a medical doctor who has written about the importance of video calls, even for introverts. “You might be surprised by how much you enjoy this kind of connecting, once you get used to it.”

I’m one of the most introverted people I know — I need very little social interaction, and often go weeks with very few social plans, even when not under quarantine. Even so, I push myself to engage in at least the occasional call with family, friends, and my therapist to keep my social skills intact and stave off any loneliness that might begin to creep up.

For some people, though, the anxiety presented by a video call eclipses the relief they might get from the face-to-face conversation.

“I am extremely self-conscious about my physicality, and seeing a constantly moving picture of myself all the time is really jarring and I hate it,” says Ed Zitron, the CEO of EZPR, a media relations company. “Seeing my face at a really bad angle is not a great feeling.”

Unlike real-life conversations, video calls often force you to stare at your own face for the duration of the call, and if you’re insecure about your appearance or merely find your floating head distracting, it can make participating in video calls unpleasant.

There’s not necessarily any need to keep your camera on the entire time, says Biali Haas.

“Turn on your camera when you join a meeting so others can see you and ‘know’ you’re there. Turn it off after that,” she suggests. “A lot of people will turn their camera off when they’re not speaking, but turn it back on when they are.” This is a great recommendation for work-related calls, and it has the added bonus of easing the strain on your internet if your connection isn’t the best.

Shveta Kumaria, a therapist and associate researcher at Northwestern University’s the Family Institute, says fun video effects could take the pressure off if you’re anxious about staring at your own face. “Use any of the backgrounds that Zoom offers, which distort some aspects of the image making it easier and fun to look at,” she says. You could also make your image into a Memoji or Animoji — I’m personally a huge fan of this option — so that you and your friends are talking to an alligator or unicorn. Memoji have no unflattering angles, and they’re either obscenely cute or funny, so they’re a great option to take away the stress and inject a sense of humor into a video call during a pandemic.

Our lives were already increasingly online; this pandemic took that trend and transformed it into a new, enforced way of life. It’s one many of us will be living with for months yet. With no established guidelines and no experience dealing with anything like this before, it’s normal if you feel like your social life is totally out of whack. But by setting boundaries, being honest, and occasionally pushing yourself to socialize even if you’re feeling a bit low-energy and depressed, we’ll all hopefully get through it okay — and for some of us, we’ll emerge with a newfound ability to better manage an active social life.