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It doesn't just seem like this to you: a day-to-day work that primarily consists of constant video conferences and many hours in the home office is exhausting, exhausting, and sometimes excruciating.
Afterwards you feel more stupid than before.
This has psychological causes.
In fact, there are a number of factors that make, first, the uniformity of the shutdown routine and, second, the constant video conferencing, a real problem for mental health.
“Zoom Fatigue” is not just a tortured joke among colleagues - it really does exist, video conference exhaustion, there are even scientific articles on this subject.
Christian Stöcker, arrow to the right
Photo: SPIEGEL ONLINE
Born 1973, is a cognitive psychologist and has been a professor at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) since autumn 2016.
There he is responsible for the "Digital Communication" course.
Before that, he headed the Netzwelt department at SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Reasons for "Zoom Fatigue" include:
In moving images the size of a credit card, we humans cannot properly recognize what is naturally carried along in a normal conversation: non-verbal signals, facial expressions, small gestures, posture.
This creates a permanent unconscious effort in the attempt to "read" the other person - unless one has already mentally disengaged from the conversation.
Constant staring at a screen strains the eyes, which was already known before Corona: The phenomenon of "digital eye strain" has been studied by ophthalmologists for years and is very widespread.
The two main problems: dry eyes due to low blink frequency and problems with depth perception and distance to the screen.
Typical symptoms: sore or strained eyes, headache, blurred perception, pain in the shoulder and neck muscles.
The two effects mentioned above get even worse if the screen (smartphone, tablet) is too small and if the head position or the distance to the monitor is not appropriate.
Even small delays in the transmission of the spoken word, which one is hardly aware of, have serious effects: They even make the other person appear less likable.
A study carried out in Berlin in 2014 found that a delay of 1.2 seconds in the transmission had serious consequences: »The same speaker was perceived as less friendly, less active, less happy, less self-efficient, less ambitious and less disciplined. «
So if you are particularly annoyed by your colleagues at the moment, it may simply have to do with the quality and size of your screen and the bandwidth of your Internet connection.
But the shutdown life itself also affects our psyche, above all our memory.
Our memory is associative, it connects things, content and experiences with each other and also with the surrounding area.
Extreme, decisive episodes are remembered in many details even after a long time.
Practically everyone can tell when and where they found out about the attacks of September 11, 2001, this is what psychology calls "Flash Bulb Memory".
But what was the day or week before the attacks?
As a rule, this can hardly be retrieved from memory.
Even two weeks of adventure vacations take up a lot more space in the episodic memory than the two weeks before that in the office.
Conversely, four, eight or twelve weeks of uniform everyday work can be reduced to a single model day in retrospect.
The environmental stimuli hardly change, the events are similar to one another, there are fewer anchors to which concrete memories can be linked.
Everyday work from home increases this effect: If you spend the whole day in your apartment and move from the kitchen to the laptop and in the evening on the sofa, you lack the external stimuli to store memories in such a way that they can be easily retrieved : the conversation with colleagues in the hallway, the meeting in the canteen, the conversation in this particular conference room.
In addition, the more familiar we are with the environment through which we move, the more many processes run automatically, “unconsciously”.
Did I just put the milk back in the fridge or was that yesterday?
The sedentary lifestyle of such an everyday life exacerbates this problem: when we don't have to navigate, parts of our brain that are very important for memory formation are less stimulated, especially the hippocampus.
In the 1940s, the famous psychologist Edward Tolman already formulated the idea that memories form a kind of »cognitive map«.
In a sense, we move spatially through our memories.
Obviously, when the part of the brain that does this has too little to do, it creates problems.
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Christian Stocker
We are the experiment: our world is changing so breathtakingly that we stagger from crisis to crisis.
We have to learn to manage this tremendous acceleration.
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
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In addition, the current situation also triggers fears or even depression for many.
Others simply have concerns for understandable reasons, such as economic reasons.
All of this has a negative impact on memory and reduces the quality of sleep.
And those who sleep poorly, consolidate their memories less well.
From this follows a series of simple pieces of advice that can help reduce zoom exhaustion and shutdown memory disorders:
Walk and talk: Switch off the video image, put on a headset and go for a walk during a conference or a conversation.
This stimulates the hippocampus, especially if you choose an unfamiliar route.
You also get exercise, daylight and fresh air.
And they don't keep trying in vain to read their colleagues' faces.
Of course, you have to agree that beforehand.
Get a laptop stand so that you don't always look down at an angle during video conferencing.
And you may ask the ophthalmologist or optician whether special computer glasses would be useful.
If you have a TV set or a projector, try a video conference with a larger picture, perhaps even from the sofa - an HDMI cable from the laptop should be sufficient for this.
Then you can read the faces of the people you are talking to better and make less effort.
Switching to the speaker's view, which many video conferencing systems offer, can help - if the person you are listening to fills in the picture, you actually understand them better.
It may even be worthwhile to upgrade your home internet bandwidth - if only so that you will be better received by your colleagues and your colleagues.
Make a conscious choice to add variety to everyday life.
Just don't eat in front of your laptop, change rooms more often, and definitely make the weekend completely different from your everyday work.
Going for a walk, exercising, gardening, doing home improvement, making music, video games or whatever: do something different.
As often as possible.
Movement helps in general: it provides variety, ensures that other parts of the brain are used, it keeps you physically fresher, helps against tension and contributes to a better quality of sleep - thus indirectly also to a better memory.
Learn autogenic training or a meditation procedure.
I only have to advise against one measure against zoom exhaustion from my own bitter experience: Singing together via video chat is an ordeal.
However, it helps a lot to make the problem of a hardly perceptible latency directly tangible: synchronous singing with a delay of a few hundred milliseconds reliably ends in chaos and howling.
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