Whether it’s a social catch-up with colleagues, or assembling to set new year objectives, many of us will be reconnecting via Zoom, Teams or Google Meet come Monday morning. Yet while such platforms have revolutionised flexible and remote working in recent years, scientists are increasingly waking up to the negative toll they can take on people’s energy levels and self-esteem. So how can we forge a healthier relationship with videoconferencing in 2025?
Relatively early during the pandemic, psychologists coined the phrase “Zoom fatigue” to describe the physical and psychological exhaustion that can come from spending extended periods on videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom. It was found that people who have more and longer meetings using the technology, or have more negative attitudes towards them, tend to feel more exhausted by them.
Further studies have linked the use of the self view function, which allows you to control whether your video is displayed on your screen during a meeting, to greater levels of fatigue. “We also found this gender effect, with women reporting more Zoom fatigue than men,” says Dr Anna Carolina Queiroz, an associate professor of interactive media at the University of Miami in Florida, who has been involved in these studies.
One insight from her research is that people tend to feel more connected to others when video calls are frequent, brief and conducted with small groups, rather than long meetings with many participants, possibly because maintaining non-verbal communication cues, such as eye contact, with many people takes a lot of mental effort.
Those who are more sensitive to these communication cues may be worse affected, which could help to explain why women – who often feel a greater pressure to present a positive image of themselves on video – tend to feel more fatigued, Queiroz says.
She suggests keeping online meetings as brief and as small as possible, and taking breaks between meetings so you are more cognitively available.
Separate research has suggested that people who spend long periods videoconferencing may start to become more aware of their appearance and more likely to report greater dissatisfaction with it. Some become so preoccupied with perceived flaws that they become anxious about attending meetings and may seek cosmetic procedures to alter their appearance.
“If you are concerned about a flaw, that tends to get intensified by continuous exposure to your image in virtual meetings,” says Dr George Kroumpouzos, a professor of dermatology at Brown University and a practising dermatologist. “We think Zoom dysmorphia is at least as common as body dysmorphic disorder – where people develop a distressing or impaired preoccupation with perceived or real defects – which affects 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 research fellow at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston, US, who is working with Kroumpouzos to create a screening questionnaire that could help identify and treat more such patients.
Even if frequent videoconferencing does not motivate people to seek facial surgery or “tweakments”, another recent study suggested it might subconsciously shape their purchasing decisions in other ways.
Dr Li Huang, an assistant professor of marketing at Hofstra University in New York, and colleagues used a mixture of eye-tracking and questionnaires to assess people’s interest in a range of products after attending various types of Zoom video calls or in-person meetings. They found that video calling increased people’s anxiety about being negatively judged by others, and increased their interest in self-enhancing products in the aftermath of the call, whether they were aware of this or not.
Negative as this may sound, “this could actually lead to some positive consequences”, Huang says. “People become more interested in self-improvement products, but this wasn’t limited to physical improvement products such as facial creams, it also included more general self-improvement, such as signing up for LinkedIn learning courses or engaging in health screening.
“Most of the time, we may not realise that these kinds of virtual interactions influence our psychological wellbeing, and may make impulsive purchases online without knowing why. Perhaps, by learning about these findings, people can try to mitigate against these kinds of effects.”
For instance, the study found that this effect was reduced if study participants were allowed to turn their web cameras off during the call, or use a ring light to enhance their physical appearance.
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Switching to “speaker view” rather than “gallery view” and turning “self view” off, also helped, as did asking participants to write a paragraph about their good qualities and characteristics after the call, to boost their self-esteem.
Another factor that may help mitigate the negative consequences of video calls is the Zoom background chosen. When Dr Heng Zhang at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and colleagues assessed the level of fatigue that people felt after videoconferencing, they found a virtual video background – such as a moving image of palm trees swaying and waves crashing on a beach – was linked to the highest levels of fatigue, followed by blurred backgrounds. Possibly this is because constantly reacting to new visual information – including when non-blurred items occasionally break through – forces the brain to work harder, Zhang says.
Those seeing a static virtual background experienced the least fatigue, especially if it was a nature-based image, which separate research suggests can have a calming effect.
Although this study didn’t assess the impact of people using their real background, Zhang – who uses a tree and mountain-based backdrop for his own video calls – suspects a static image may still be better. “If you have your own office, it’s OK, but if you’re in a coffee shop or working outside, there might be people walking behind you or other things happening that divert the brain’s attention,” Zhang says. “Even if you have your own office, you might be distracted by personal objects, or wondering what the other person thinks about you.”
As well as using such insights to help individuals 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 enable users to adjust the lighting or background blur, to more authentically improve their appearance.
“Allowing greater autonomy in privacy settings, such as controlling who can view them and when, may also help users reduce the pressure of being constantly visible to many people in the meeting,” she says.
Platforms could even consider leveraging artificial intelligence to detect signs of emotional distress in people’s voices or facial expressions, and offering features such as discreet breaks or mindfulness exercises to help them manage their emotions, says Huang.
