How to handle Zoom calls in 2025: in smaller groups with static backgrounds

WWhether it’s a nice catch-up with colleagues, or coming together to set new year goals, many of us will reconnect Monday morning via Zoom, Teams or Google Meet. But while such platforms have revolutionized flexible remote working in recent years, scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the negative toll they can take on people’s energy levels and self-esteem. How can we build a healthier relationship with videoconferencing in 2025?

Relatively early in the pandemic, psychologists coined the term “Zoom fatigue” to describe the physical and psychological exhaustion that can result from spending long periods of time on videoconferencing platforms like Zoom. It turned out that people who meet more often and for longer using technology, or have a more negative attitude towards it, tend to have this feeling more exhausted by them.

Further research has linked use of the self-view feature, which allows you to control whether your video appears on your screen during a meeting, to greater 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, short and conducted with small groups, rather than long meetings with many participants, possibly because maintaining nonverbal communication signals, such as eye contact, takes a lot of time with many people requires. a lot of mental effort.

Those who are more sensitive to these communication signals may be more affected, which could help explain why women — who often feel greater pressure to present a positive image of themselves on video — feel more tired, Queiroz says.

She suggests keeping online meetings as short and small as possible, and taking breaks between meetings so you can be more cognitively available.

Different research has suggested that people who spend long periods of time videoconferencing may become more aware of their appearance and are more likely to report dissatisfaction with it. Some become so preoccupied with perceived flaws that they worry about attending meetings and seek cosmetic procedures to change their appearance.

“Concerns about a defect are often amplified by constant exposure to your image during virtual meetings,” says Dr. George Kroumpouzos, a professor of dermatology at Brown University and a practicing dermatologist. “We think Zoom dysmorphia is at least as common as body dysmorphic disorder – in which people develop a distressing or diminished preoccupation with perceived or real flaws – which affects about 2% of the general population.”

Identifying it is important because Zoom dysmorphia is very likely to cause 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 fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA , which is teaming up with Kroumpouzos to create a screening questionnaire which could help identify and treat more such patients.

Even if frequent videoconferencing doesn’t motivate people to seek facial surgery or “adjustments,” yet another recent study suggested it could unknowingly influence their purchasing decisions in other ways.

Dr. Li Huang, an assistant professor of marketing at Hofstra University in New York, and colleagues used a combination of eye-tracking and questionnaires to assess people’s interest in a range of products after attending different types of Zoom video calls or in-person meetings. They found that video calls increased people’s fear of being negatively judged by others, and their interest in self-improvement products increased in the aftermath of the conversation, whether they were aware of it or not.

As negative as this may sound, “this could actually lead to positive consequences,” says Huang. “People are becoming more interested in self-improvement products, but this was not limited to physical improvement products such as face creams, but also included more general self-improvement such as signing up for LinkedIn learning courses or taking part in health screenings.

“Typically, we may not realize that these types of virtual interactions affect our psychological well-being, and we may make impulsive purchases online without knowing why. Perhaps by learning about these findings, people can try to mitigate these types of effects.”

For example, the study found that this effect was reduced if study participants were allowed to turn off their webcams during the call, or use a ring light to improve their physical appearance.

Switching to ‘speaker view’ instead of ‘gallery view’ and turning off ‘self view’ also helped, as did asking participants to write a paragraph after the conversation about their good qualities and characteristics, to increase their sense of to increase self-esteem.

Another factor that can help mitigate the negative effects of video calls is the Zoom background chosen. When Dr. Heng Zhang of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and colleagues assessed the level of fatigue people felt after videoconferencing, they found that a virtual video background – such as a moving image of swaying palm trees and waves crashing on a beach – was associated with held the highest levels of fatigue, followed by blurred backgrounds. This may be because constantly responding to new visual information — even when non-blurred items occasionally break through — forces the brain to work harder, says Zhang.

Those who saw a static virtual background experienced the least fatigue, especially if it was a nature-based image, which separate research suggests may have a calming effect.

Although this study didn’t look at the impact of people using their real background, Zhang – who uses a background of trees and mountains for his own video calls – suspects that a static image is still better. “If you have your own office, that’s not a problem, but if you’re sitting in a coffee shop or working outside, people may be walking behind you or other things may be happening that distract the brain’s attention,” says Zhang. “Even if you have your own office, you can be distracted by personal objects or wonder what the other person thinks about you.”

In addition to using such insights to help individuals protect themselves from the negative emotional effects of videoconferencing, Huang would like to see platforms take steps to promote a more positive user experience. For example, instead of offering standard beauty filters, they could allow users to adjust lighting or background blur to enhance their appearance more authentically.

“Allowing greater autonomy in privacy settings, such as controlling who can view them and when, can also help users reduce the pressure of being constantly visible to many people in the meeting,” she says.

Platforms could even consider using artificial intelligence to detect signs of emotional distress in people’s voices or facial expressions, and offer features such as discrete breaks or mindfulness exercises to help them manage their emotions, Huang says.