W.Whether it’s catching up with colleagues or getting together to set New Year’s goals, many of us will be reconnecting via Zoom, Teams or Google Meet on Monday morning. However, while these platforms have revolutionized flexible and remote working in recent years, scientists are increasingly realizing the negative toll they can have on people’s energy levels and self-esteem. So how can we forge a healthier relationship with video conferencing in 2025?
Relatively early during the pandemic, psychologists coined the phrase “Zoom fatigue” to describe the physical and psychological exhaustion that can result from spending prolonged periods on video conferencing platforms like Zoom. It was found that people who have longer and longer meetings using technology, or have more negative attitudes towards them, tend to feel more exhausted by them.
Other studies have linked using the self-view feature, which allows you to control whether your video is displayed on your screen during a meeting, with higher levels of fatigue. “We also found this gender effect: Women reported more Zoom fatigue than men,” says Dr. Anna Carolina Queiroz, an associate professor of interactive media at the University of Miami in Florida, who participated in these studies.
An idea of her investigation is that people tend to feel more connected to others when video calls are frequent, short, and conducted with small groups, rather than long meetings with many participants, possibly because maintaining nonverbal communication cues, such as eye contact, with For many people it requires more effort. a lot of mental effort.
Those who are more sensitive to these communication cues may be more affected, which could help explain why women (who often feel greater pressure to present a positive image of themselves on video) tend to feel more fatigued, he says. Queiroz.
She suggests keeping online meetings as short and small as possible, and taking breaks between meetings to be more cognitively available.
Separate investigation has suggested that people who spend long periods video conferencing may begin to become more aware of their appearance and be more likely to report greater dissatisfaction with it. Some become so concerned about perceived flaws that they become anxious about attending meetings and may seek cosmetic procedures to alter their appearance.
“If you’re concerned about a flaw, that tends to be intensified by continued exposure to your image in virtual meetings,” says Dr. George Kroumpouzos, a professor of dermatology at Brown University and a practicing dermatologist. “We believe that Zoom dysmorphia is at least as common as body dysmorphic disorder, where people develop a distressing or disturbed preoccupation with perceived or real defects, affecting approximately 2% of the general population.”
Identifying it is important, because Zoom dysmorphia is very likely to trigger an increase in body dysmorphic disorder, with potentially devastating consequences for people’s work and personal lives, says Dr. Cemre Türk, a dermatologist and postdoctoral researcher at the General Hospital of Massachusetts in Boston, USA, who is working with Kroumpouzos to create a selection questionnaire That could help identify and treat more such patients.
Even if frequent video conferencing does not motivate people to seek facial surgery or “touch-ups,” another recent study suggested You might unconsciously shape your purchasing decisions in other ways.
Dr. Li Huang, an assistant professor of marketing at Hofstra University in New York, and his colleagues used a combination of eye tracking and questionnaires to assess people’s interest in a variety of products after attending various types of video calls. Zoom or in-person meetings. They found that video calls increased people’s anxiety about being judged negatively by others and increased their interest in self-improvement products after the call, whether they were aware of it or not.
As negative as it may seem, “this could actually have some positive consequences,” Huang says. “People are more interested in self-improvement products, but this was not limited to physical improvement products such as face creams, but also included more general self-improvement, such as signing up for LinkedIn learning courses or participating in exams. health.
“Most of the time, we may not realize that these types of virtual interactions influence our psychological well-being and we may make impulsive purchases online without knowing why. Perhaps, by knowing these findings, people can try to mitigate these types of effects.”
For example, the study found that this effect was reduced if study participants were allowed to turn off their webcams during the call or use a ring light to improve their physical appearance.
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Switching to “speaker view” instead of “gallery view” and turning off “own view” also helped, as did asking participants to write a paragraph about their good qualities and characteristics after the call, to increase your self-esteem.
Another factor that can help mitigate the negative consequences of video calls is the zoom background favorite. When Dr. Heng Zhang of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and his colleagues assessed the level of fatigue people felt after a video conference, they found that a virtual video background (such as a moving image of swaying palm trees and crashing waves) on a beach) was related to the highest levels of fatigue, followed by blurry backgrounds. Possibly this is because constantly reacting to new visual information, even when non-blurred elements occasionally appear, forces the brain to work harder, Zhang says.
Those who viewed a static virtual background experienced the least fatigue, especially if it was a nature-based image, which, according to separate research, can have a calming effect.
Although this study did not evaluate the impact of people using their real environment, Zhang, who uses a background of trees and mountains for his own video calls, suspects that a static image may still be better. “If you have your own office, that’s fine, but if you’re in a coffee shop or working outdoors, there may be people walking behind you or other things happening that take your brain’s attention away,” Zhang says. “Even if you have your own office, you may find yourself distracted by personal items or wondering what the other person thinks of you.”
In addition to using these insights to help people protect themselves against the negative emotional effects of video conferencing, Huang would like to see platforms take steps to foster a more positive user experience. For example, instead of offering standard beauty filters, they could allow users to adjust lighting or background blur to enhance their appearance more authentically.
“Allowing greater autonomy in privacy settings, such as controlling who can see them and when, can also help users reduce the pressure of constantly being visible to many people in the meeting,” he says.
Platforms could even consider leveraging artificial intelligence to detect signs of emotional distress in people’s voices or facial expressions, and offer features such as discreet breaks or mindfulness exercises to help them manage their emotions, Huang says.