In the past few weeks, Zoom has become a verb. Work meetings, job interviews, yoga classes, pub quizzes, family dinners, first dates. You name, we’re zooming it.
Not to mention Email. HouseParty. Teams. Slack. Whatsapp. Instagram Direct. A firehose of cross-channel communication, despite the fact we may be feeling more disconnected than ever before from other.
In a work world that’s endlessly updating and with very little separating us physically from where we work and sleep/play/eat/exercise etc, the boundaries that may have been there before are also blurring. While we may have initially been excited about the thought of a couple of hours reclaimed without our commute, the reality is it’s near impossible to locate that time in the everyday.
We feel more exhausted than ever. Why?
In part one of a two part series, I spoke to a range of workplace and wellbeing experts to find out what is it about our current screen-heavy, always-on WFH (working from home) situation is so draining…
After all, Zoom itself isn’t new, it’s been around for the past nine years. Even Houseparty has been around since 2016. As millennials, many of us have always worked in a workplace setting where we’ve been issued with multiple company devices and the associated expectations of said devices.
But this extreme reliance on these technologies and our screens and devices is new.
Despite visions of reclaiming the commute, we’re likely working more than before. Digital mindfulness thought leader, Dr Lawrence Ampofo cites research that “suggests that people do far more hours working from home than they do working in the office, leading to physical and emotional exhaustion.”
“It is increasingly evident that people working from home are under scrutiny with the fear that they might not be working if they are not connected. This level of scrutiny is emotionally and physically draining for employees who have to deliver more face time when working from home,” Ampofo says.
Susanne Haegele, a yoga teacher, translator and writer notes, “in some industries there can be pressure to show your boss you are still performing well, which depending on your work is sometimes not easy to achieve under current circumstances.”
This connection between physical and emotional exhaustion is echoed by specialist women’s health physiotherapist, Lisa Few: “Emotional stress can have a big impact on our bodies and a lot of us at the moment are under a huge amount of emotional stress.”
“Whilst we’re used to working with computers and doing online conferencing for work, right now our worlds have been turned upside down,” says reflexologist and aromatherapist Lyn Franklin. “We’re on overdrive with our screens, having to use them almost constantly to communicate with colleagues and clients online. We are simply just not used to working on our screens the whole time and our brains and bodies are having to adapt.”
Like personal trainer Sandy Rowe mentioned in ‘One foot in front of the other’, Few as a physiotherapist and Franklin as a reflexologist both work in fields traditionally “hands on” but have adapted to online for the time being. Few now offers virtual appointments and pilates classes, and Franklin is continuing to offer virtual support for natural fertility, IVF and pregnancy via online consultations.
The nuances of how a video conference call appears on our screens, with multiple boxes of tiny faces to assess, also means “we’re not getting the usual visual cues we normally rely on when we’re sitting face to face with people. We’re having to concentrate so much harder looking for those micro expressions and to assess body language accurately,” says Franklin.
Digging back through Zoom’s blog archives to 2014, the company cites one of the most common video anxieties (and thus a barrier to choosing to Zoom), as a fear of being seen on screen, of being visible and “on display” for all to see. Fast forward to April 2020 with back to back video calls booked in and we often don’t have the time observe that anxiety we might have felt about the odd video call request before, despite the fact it may still be lingering there.
It’s not just being seen by others than can be draining, as Charlotte Armitage, a media and business psychologist at YAFTA shared in a recent Stylist article about the impact of simultaneously seeing ourselves mirrored back to us on the screen as well. “The additional psychological processing involved in attending to one’s own behaviour and actions, as mirrored by the online platform, can be draining for a whole number of reasons. At the very least, it adds an additional level of stimuli that you wouldn’t have had in a face to face meeting.”
Optometrist and style blogger, Elizabeth Yeowart says this current climate means we are “more likely to reach for our phones to scroll social media and to check the news. Because we are also using Facetime, Zoom, House Party etc as a way of "seeing" friends and family as well as for carrying out meetings, our eyes are using screens more than usual.”
Yeowart touches above on the uniqueness of the current situation that means it’s not merely work needs driving our increased screen usage, but all aspects of our lives.
“We’re not only having to use our computers so much more in our everyday work with colleagues and clients,” says Franklin. “But on top of this we’re also having to spend a lot of our evenings and weekends on screens too, in order to keep in touch with friends and family. Normally we’d be getting out and about together face to face for down time with loved ones.”
In ‘How to make the most of your new working from home situation’, Callum and others who had experience with working from home pre-lockdown, spoke about the importance of separating work and play spaces as “it helps me to mentally categorise the different areas of my apartment and what I use them for.”
This separation isn’t always possible and isn’t just about the physical distinction either, as Haegele notes: “There’s no major physical separation between home and work, which means you don't have that transition time between work and private life, so they mix even more. You take worries and tension from one area of your life to the other even more than usual, and may struggle to separate them.”
Regardless of where in your home you nominate as your working zone, how you set this space up also makes a difference.
“The majority of us won’t have a good ergonomic chair and desk at home to work from and sitting with poor posture and positioning that can be hard on our bodies. When our bodies are under chronic physical stress, for example sitting with poor posture, this can affect our musculoskeletal, neurological, cardiovascular and digestive systems,” says Few.
Haegele, who runs ‘For your eyes only’ a yoga workshop imparting the yogic way of training and soothing your eyes, echoes Few: “your set-up may cause back pain or eye strain, because your chair, desk, keyboard, screen position, and lighting may be inadequate.”
Many of us will have seen the meme about discovering that our partner/flatmate is ‘that guy’ (or girl) who uses the cliched sayings on conference calls that makes us cringe a little inside and check off the Zoom Bingo card. Or vice versa, we may feel self-conscious sharing our whole selves with those we live with.
As Haegele notes, this too can cause us tension, whereby “your behaviour and personality at work may differ from your private persona, so your different "faces" can also be confusing for you and your other household members.”
Finally, that lack of commute has also interrupted the natural rhythms and incidental exercise we may have taken for granted.
“Our physical activities have changed significantly overnight,” says Few. “We are no longer rushing out the door in the morning or running for the train, climbing stairs at work, walking around the office or going to the gym during the day. Sitting for long periods of time means that the blood flow to our muscles decreases and this can make our muscles achey and stiff.”
Franklin agrees: “we’ve become so much more sedentary and we’re not able to compensate by heading out regularly for a change of scenery, to the gym or to an exercise class or to let off steam in the ways we usually do. Spending all this time at home sitting in front of a computer is taking its toll on our bodies and posture too.”
So a multitude of explanations for WHY we may be feeling more drained than usual. Next up, now that we have the awareness of what could be contributing towards feeling so exhausted, I asked our experts, how much is too much and what steps can we take to feel better?