Are video calls burning you out?
Are you feeling the Zoom fatigue? If so, you’re not alone. Many of us are working from home or other remote locations right now. And even people who aren’t working remotely may be doing more video calls to connect with family and other loved ones.
With this shift to spending more time in video calls, many people are starting to experience video call burnout. Maybe you used to go into an office most days, and your eight hours of back to back meetings were at least punctuated by room changes and taking the stairs to a different floor. But now, you sit in your makeshift home office, on calls for eight hours, with your legs practically atrophying beneath you.
Or maybe your team used to do a happy hour every week where you had the chance to connect with people one by one, and the new video call happy hour just feels like a terrible cacophony of everyone talking and zero actual connection happening.
Or maybe you’re tired of seeing yourself on video but you also can’t seem to not look at your self-view. You’re afraid that if you turn it off, you’ll forget you’re on video at all and start rolling your eyes or just stare off into the distance.
While it’s clearly true that being on video calls isn’t the same as being in person, it’s also true that it doesn’t have to lead to video call burnout. That’s because the video calls themselves are not creating the burnout. Yes, our brains interact differently with video calls than they do with being in person, but the burnout you feel is actually created by the thoughts you have ABOUT video calls, not the video calls themselves.
There are actionable steps you can take to make video calls more enjoyable, but that’s not what I’m going to focus on in this post. Because the biggest difference is made with your own thoughts. And when you change your thoughts about video calls, your brain will also come up with tons of actionable things that will improve your particular experience.
Let me break this down for you. When you think video calls are the problem, that’s what you’ll experience. Because of the brain’s confirmation bias, it will show you data that matches your beliefs. Your brain will even ignore evidence to the contrary, because that’s what brains do when they are committed to one way of seeing things. On top of that, when you think the video call is the problem, and that it’s out of your control, you actually block yourself from coming up with creative solutions. When we think things are out of our control, then we also don’t try to change things. When we don’t try to change things, they generally don’t change. Our brains’ confirmation bias takes this as evidence that things are unchangeable.
Mindset - changing your thoughts - is key here because without changing your thoughts, you won’t have access to your own full set of problem solving skills. I see this happen again and again in all areas of clients’ lives. When they think “the thing” is the problem, then they’re stuck. But when they are willing to believe that maybe the thing isn’t the problem, and that changing their thoughts could help them come up with a better solution, then they are empowered. The same is true for you.
There are two thought patterns in particular that I see creating video call burnout (and yes, they also create other kinds of burnout, too). While you may not be thinking these exact thoughts, chances are high that if you’re experiencing video call burnout, you are thinking a variation of one or both of these.
I have to do this.
This isn’t as good as ___________.
While “I have to do this” may seem true - you may be on these calls for work - when we tell ourselves, “I have to,” we don’t feel in control of our own lives. For most of my clients, this outlook feels disempowering, draining, and exhausting.
Take a moment to think about the calls you’re attending. Is it absolutely true that you have to take them? What consequences would you face if you chose to decline one or some of them? What feelings might come up for you if you chose to decline some of them or set limits? Probably, you are choosing to be on these calls because you either don’t want the consequences of skipping them or you don’t want to feel the feeling you’d feel if you declined them.
There are very few things in life that we have to do. This is not just semantics. It is not bright-siding. It is about remembering that you are the one choosing to do whatever you’re doing for some reason. When you get on a video call thinking, “I’m choosing to be here for X, Y, Z reasons,” you’re telling yourself the truth and you’re reminding yourself that you are the one in control. This is not only more accurate but also more empowering.
Like “I have to,” “this isn’t as good as ___________” may seem true but it is only one viewpoint. When you think it, confirmation bias will kick in and show you all the ways that video calls aren’t as good as whatever you’re comparing them to and it will suppress data to the contrary.
It will seem factual, but it won’t actually BE factual. If this confirmation bias felt awesome and got you good results, that would be one thing. But it feels depressing and burns you out. Ergo, it’s worth changing.
Ask yourself this question: am I willing to be wrong about video calls if it means getting to feel better?
If you are willing to entertain the idea that you could do video calls without ending the day feeling totally drained, then you can ask yourself what that would look like, what changes you’d need to make.
When you start with the premise that you *can* have a better experience, it’s much easier for your brain to come up with ways to make it happen and to actually implement them. When you’re convinced that you can’t have a better experience, you don’t bother to brainstorm or implement solutions, and you get more of what you already had.
Ready to finally handle your work burnout once and for all? I’m currently accepting new clients and speaking engagements. Click here to learn more.