What Is It About Zoom That Makes Us So Tired?
By: Kristina Hemzacek
Tags: Zoom, Pandemic, Self, Business, University

What Is It About Zoom That Makes Us So Tired?

The term “Zoom fatigue” recently entered the mainstream vocabulary. So, why is Zoom so exhausting?

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, my semester started. So far, I both love and hate my studies. I love what I’m studying, my professors and colleagues are great: kind and funny, but also curious and brilliant. I’m learning and reading a lot. I’m also writing a lot. All of that is great.

The thing that I hate or really, really, really dislike is Zoom.

I have heard other people complain about it since the pandemic started and everything got moved online, but I arrogantly assumed that I would just be able to handle it so much better than everyone else. I’ve been working behind a screen 40+ hours a week for the last three and a half years after all. How bad can it be?

Well, bad.

If you’ve only used it sporadically, you may not have noticed the fatigue that comes with using it regularly (for several hours a day, for example). It’s just a video-call app that has some neat features like scheduling meetings, recording them, dividing the meeting in breakout rooms, etc. Sounds very convenient.

I remembered listening to my friends complaining about Zoom early in the pandemic, how they hated the online meeting situation, how it’s exhausting. Now I finally understood what they were talking about.

Zoom sucks.

But I wasn’t happy with that conclusion. I needed to know why. What was it about Zoom specifically that was so energy-draining? Is it the number of people in a meeting? Is it the length of my lectures? Is it the concept of video calls? And, perhaps most importantly, is it possible to make the experience better?

Hawthorne Effect, Demand Characteristics, and Online Mirrors

Hawthorne Effect refers to a type of bias that happens in research when the research participants adjust their behaviour because they are aware that they are being watched. It was named after the experiments conducted within the Hawthorne plant, described in Elton Mayo’s book “The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization”.

The experiments were trying to discover whether the amount of light the workers had to work with would influence their productivity levels. What was found instead was that it wasn’t the light but the attention that the workers received from the researchers that increased their productivity. This finding has been contested since the study was published, but there appears to be evidence in other studies that subjects tend to act differently when they are aware that they are being watched.

A good example of this is a study from 2006, which showed that there was a 55% increase in compliance with hand-washing of healthcare personnel working in five intensive care units at a university hospital in Berlin, Germany.

A concept that is closely related to the Hawthorne effect is “demand characteristics”. While the Hawthorne effect means that the subjects adjust their behaviour when they are aware that they are being watched, the concept of demand characteristics refers to them being aware of what the researcher is studying or what they are expecting to find. The subjects, then, adjust their behaviour or answers in the interview. This concept was first developed by a professor of psychiatry and psychology, dr. Martin Theodore Orne.

Orne was originally particularly struck by how helpful were research participants. He identified that research participants believed in the importance of science and tried to help advance it by playing the role of the “good subject”, thereby seeking to satisfy the perceived needs of the researchers (McCambridge et al., 2012)

It isn’t only in a research setting that people adjust their behaviour. According to social psychology, we change how we talk, act, and present ourselves depending on who is around us.

Our everyday behaviour is a result of both internal factors (our personality, state of mind, how we think about ourselves) and external factors (situations we find ourselves in, how we interpret our relationship to those situations or persons that are in those situations with us).

So, being in an academic setting will cause you to act quite differently than you would if you were in an informal setting, hanging out with friends or grabbing a beer in the local pub. The same can be said for being in a business meeting as opposed to being at a team-building event or, again, just hanging out with your friends. Even if you don’t think about it, you subconsciously adjust your behaviour, use of language, and your wardrobe.

The reason we all do this is that we are aware that (1) we are being watched (meaning that there are other people present, not that there’s a You-type stalker around — hopefully) and (2) there are certain societal expectations that we need to fulfil.

This added labour that we have to do while doing other tasks is usually called “emotional labour”. At work or in any formal setting, you are required not only to “do your job” but also to manage your behaviour, your emotions, responses, etc. This is tiring as it is, but with video calls, there is one extra layer that makes it especially challenging: the online mirror.

In a short documentary about Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), which refers to a psychiatric disorder in which a person cannot help but obsess over one or several perceived flaws in their appearance, the researcher talks about how mirrors enable the fixation on the perceived flaw.

People who do not have BDD will, of course, not have the same experience with mirrors as people who are ill, but they can still negatively affect them.