Why We Feel Post-Pandemic Burnout and Exhaustion

Previous columns explored the post-pandemic mindsets of loneliness, anxiety, and reflexive outrage. This last in a quartet of essays discusses the mindset of burnout and exhaustion.

Only a few months into 2020, “Zoom fatigue” became a discussion topic. Most complaints were about sound or video dropping out due to poor WiFi. But there's more than that; video callers speak 15 percent louder than they do in person, need effort to focus and shift their attention among a dozen or more participants, and worry whether they come across as interested and engaged. These factors demand extra emotional effort compared to face-to-face encounters, which is why virtual meetings quickly become exhausting.

The cognitive load of online meetings eats up mental capacity. When face-to-face, we process a slew of signals: facial expression, gesture, posture, tone, distance between speakers, and rhythm of the other’s voice. We read body language and make emotional judgments about whether others are credible or not. This is easy to do in person whereas video chats force us to work to glean nonverbal cues. Doing so also consumes a lot of energy.

Compared to electronic devices, the human brain operates at ridiculously slow speeds of about 120 bits (about 15 bytes) per second. Listening to one person takes about 60 bits per second of brainpower or half our available bandwidth. Trying to follow two people speaking at once is nigh impossible for the same reason that multitaskers fare poorly: attempting to handle two or more simultaneous tasks maxes out our operating bandwidth.

As attention flags, we fatigue. Yet it is the audio gaps, not video ones, that make Zoom sessions draining. All languages have established rules for conversation that assure no overlap and no long silences. Online meetings disrupt that convention because separate sound and video streams are chopped up into tiny digital “packets” and sent via different channels to the recipient’s end where they are electronically reassembled. When some packets arrive late the software has to decide whether to wait for reassembly—leading to a delay—or stitch together whatever packets are available, giving rise to stuttering audio.

Video conferencing platforms have opted to deliver audio that arrives quickly but is low in quality. Platforms aim for a lag time of fewer than 150 milliseconds. That is enough to defy the no-overlap/no-gap convention to which speakers are accustomed. A round-trip signal can take up to 300 milliseconds before one gets a reply, a pause that makes speakers seem less convincing and untrustworthy. A bigger problem than technical delays are interruptions in which speakers talk over one another. Repeatedly having to sort out clashes over who goes first is tiresome and draining to everyone on the call.

Speaking by phone uses far fewer resources than speaking by Skype or Zoom. On the phone we can concentrate on one voice only. We can pace around during the call if we want, which helps our thinking. The simple act of walking is well established to improve problem-solving and creativity. At the office, we congregate in break rooms or around the water cooler. We can poke our head in down the hall.

The physical location in which we meet with co-workers matters, too, because every location carries implicit meaning that colors decisions and the way we think. Work provides an abundance of potential locations for conversation, whereas working from home merges a life of previously well-defined areas into an amorphous mass. This, and the temptation to multitask, strains our cognitive abilities. Stress hormones secreted in abundance make it worse.

The mental strain of having to look at oneself over hours of Zoom meetings results in what Stanford University psychologists call “mirror anxiety,” while “Zoom dysmorphia” describes user anxiety about dark circles, wrinkles, or bad hair. From a sample of 10,322 subjects, 14% of women felt “very” or “extremely” fatigued after zoom calls compared to only 6% of men. Researchers devised a “Zoom and Exhaustion Fatigue” scale to assess how serious the problem felt across five dimensions of fatigue: general, social, emotional, visual, and motivational.

In addition to experiencing mirror anxiety, women feel trapped more than men: they take fewer breaks and feel more obligated to hover within the camera’s frame. Previous studies tell us that looking in a mirror raises self-consciousness and self-criticism about one’s appearance. Because the post-pandemic future of work seems likely to be a hybrid of partly remote and partly in-person, their findings bear keeping in mind.

Burnout Essential Reads

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Reporter Anne Branigin writes about how videoconferencing reshapes the routines of those working from home, as well as the “Zoom boom” spike in cosmetic surgery consultations, which are up 64 percent from pre-pandemic baselines according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, likens our sudden immersion in videoconferencing to spending entire workdays with a mirror in hand. “Zoom users are seeing reflections of themselves at a frequency and duration that hasn’t been seen before in the history of media and likely the history of people.”

The relationships we forge in communal workspaces are more significant than we think. In Someone to Talk To, Harvard sociologist Mario Small notes that we are more likely to discuss important matters with people who are readily available than with those who are emotionally close, such as family and long-time friends. Most of us have the bulk of our social interactions at work, and turn to colleagues when the need arises.

When working from home, these casual interactions either don’t happen or else have to be scheduled. And because Zoom, email, and texts feel qualitatively different from face-to-face talk, we perhaps weigh them as less meaningful that they actually are.

As the pandemic wore on, productivity burnout set in. The added demands on our attention were simply not sustainable. We felt as if we had too much to handle and were getting a lot less done. Trying to manage too many details can make you mentally foggy or suspect that memory is failing.

As lockdown wore on, malaise, ennui, and lethargy crept in. We had to stop and ask ourselves what day it was. We labored to remember what movie we had streamed only last night or what we had for dinner. Responding to a New York Times questionnaire, a college student attending a year of remote classes said, “I’m so burnt out that even this form is way, way too long.”

She was already at the mercy of every digital distraction.