Just imagine that you're in your fifth Zoom meeting of the day. As your colleague presents quarterly results, you find yourself staring at that little box in the corner of your screen. The one showing your face. Is your hair sticking up? Do you look engaged enough? Should you adjust the camera angle? Before you know it, ten minutes have passed and you've absorbed almost nothing about those quarterly results.

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. And now science has an explanation for why constantly watching yourself during virtual meetings might be sabotaging your workday in ways you never imagined.

Researchers from Germany have uncovered a fascinating paradox at the heart of our video call experience: the very feature designed to help us present ourselves better, the self-view window, might actually be undermining our productivity, satisfaction, and enjoyment during online meetings. But here's the twist: whether it helps or hurts you depends entirely on whether you're speaking or listening.

The Mirror That Never Goes Away

Think about how often you looked at yourself in a mirror before the pandemic. Maybe a few times in the morning while getting ready, perhaps a quick glance in the bathroom during the day. Five minutes total? Ten at most?

Now consider this: the average European employee surveyed in this study spent nearly half their virtual meeting time looking at their own face when speaking, and slightly less when listening. With virtual meetings consuming over 21 hours of the average work week, that translates to roughly 10 hours per week of staring at yourself. That's more mirror time in a week than most people experienced in a month before videoconferencing took over.

This isn't just a quirky modern phenomenon. It represents a fundamental shift in human behavior with real psychological consequences. Never before in human history have people consumed this much "self-referential information," as the researchers call it. And our brains are struggling to cope.

The Science of Self-Watching

To understand what's happening, researchers surveyed 311 European employees about their most recent work-related virtual meeting. They asked detailed questions about how often participants looked at their self-view window, how self-aware they felt, and how they rated the meeting on satisfaction, productivity, and enjoyment.

The findings paint a complex picture. When you look at yourself during a video call, you enter what psychologists call a state of heightened self-awareness. This means you become the object of your own attention. Instead of focusing outward on the meeting content or other participants, your mental energy turns inward.

Here's where it gets interesting. According to objective self-awareness theory, when we see ourselves, we automatically compare what we observe (our "real" self) to who we think we should be (our "ideal" self). This comparison almost always reveals a gap. Maybe your hair isn't quite right. Perhaps you look more tired than you'd like. Your posture could be better. Whatever the discrepancy, identifying it creates an unpleasant feeling that demands mental resources to address.

Think of it like running two programs on your computer simultaneously. One program is the meeting itself, processing information, contributing ideas, and staying engaged. The other program is constantly evaluating your appearance, monitoring your expressions, and managing how you come across to others. Neither program can run at full capacity because they're competing for the same limited processing power.

This is where the strength model of self-control comes in. Psychologists have found that self-control works like a muscle. The more you use it, the more fatigued it becomes. Every time you resist the urge to fiddle with your camera angle or fix your hair, every moment you spend evaluating whether you look professional enough, you're depleting a finite mental resource. Eventually, this depletion takes a toll on your ability to focus on what actually matters: the meeting content.

The Speaker-Listener Divide

But here's where the story takes an unexpected turn. The researchers discovered that self-view doesn't affect everyone the same way. Whether watching yourself helps or hurts depends critically on your role in the meeting.

For listeners, the news isn't good. When you're quietly attending a meeting, taking in information without actively participating, looking at yourself creates a perfect storm for mental fatigue. You have cognitive capacity to spare, since you're not formulating thoughts or speaking. That spare capacity gets absorbed by self-monitoring. You start noticing every little thing about your appearance, evaluating yourself against an ideal, and before you know it, you've mentally checked out of the meeting.

The research found that for listeners, higher engagement with self-view directly decreased satisfaction with the meeting process. It also indirectly decreased productivity and enjoyment through heightened self-awareness. When you're supposed to be absorbing information but instead you're critiquing your on-screen appearance, you're essentially wasting the meeting time.

For speakers, however, something entirely different happens. The study found that looking at yourself while presenting or speaking actually increased satisfaction with the meeting process and enjoyment. Why? Because when you're speaking, seeing yourself serves a useful purpose. It gives you real-time feedback about how you're coming across to your audience. Are you making appropriate facial expressions? Does your body language convey confidence? This information helps you adjust your delivery on the fly.

Think of it like having a coach whispering tips during a performance. For a speaker, the self-view becomes a tool for impression management. It compensates for the lack of audience cues that would normally tell you how you're doing. In a physical meeting room, you'd see people's faces, gauge their reactions, notice if they're leaning in with interest or checking their phones. On a video call, especially with cameras off or gallery views showing tiny thumbnails, these cues vanish. Your own video becomes a proxy for audience feedback.

The research revealed this wasn't just about feeling better. Speakers who looked at themselves more actually reported higher meeting satisfaction and enjoyment, even though they also experienced heightened self-awareness. The benefits of self-monitoring while speaking outweighed the cognitive costs.

The Hidden Thief of Productivity

Despite these role-based differences, the study uncovered a consistent villain: the state of self-awareness itself. Regardless of whether you're speaking or listening, higher self-awareness consistently predicted worse outcomes. People who felt more self-aware during meetings reported lower satisfaction with the meeting process, reduced perceived productivity, and less enjoyment.

This makes intuitive sense. Self-awareness, while sometimes useful, is fundamentally an inward-focused state. It pulls your attention away from the external world and toward your internal experience. In a work meeting, this means less mental energy available for the actual work.

The researchers found that self-awareness acted as a mediator between looking at yourself and meeting outcomes. In other words, watching yourself doesn't directly ruin your meeting experience. Instead, it triggers self-awareness, and that heightened self-awareness then undermines your productivity and satisfaction.

For listeners, this creates a double whammy. Looking at yourself both directly harms the meeting experience and indirectly harms it through increased self-awareness. For speakers, there's a competitive mediation at play. Direct benefits of self-monitoring compete against indirect costs of self-awareness, with the direct benefits slightly winning out for satisfaction and enjoyment, though not for productivity.

Who's Most at Risk?

The research also uncovered interesting individual differences. Women reported looking at themselves more than men when speaking, though gender differences disappeared when listening. This aligns with broader research showing that women face greater societal pressure around appearance and impression management.

Age played a role too. Younger employees looked at themselves more frequently than older ones when speaking. This might reflect generational differences in comfort with technology, or perhaps older workers have developed better strategies for managing self-focus.

Personality matters as well. People with higher dispositional self-awareness, meaning those who naturally tend to be more self-focused in general, looked at themselves more in both roles. For these individuals, the self-view window amplifies an existing tendency, potentially making the negative effects even stronger.

The Real-World Toll

These findings have profound implications for the millions of people whose work lives now revolve around video calls. Consider the scale: if virtual meetings occupy 21 hours per week, and heightened self-awareness undermines productivity throughout that time, we're looking at a massive collective loss of productive capacity.

Think about the economic impact. Organizations are paying employees for those 21 hours of meeting time, expecting valuable outcomes like information sharing, decision making, and collaboration. But if a significant portion of attendees are mentally checked out, monitoring their own appearance instead of engaging with content, that's a substantial inefficiency.

The human cost matters too. The study found that perceived overabundance of virtual meetings correlated with lower satisfaction. When you're already feeling meeting fatigue, adding the burden of constant self-monitoring makes the problem worse. It's not just about getting less done. It's about the psychological wear and tear of perpetually being both participant and audience, both performer and critic.

For managers and team leaders, the findings are particularly relevant. If you're running a meeting where most participants are in listening mode, you're creating conditions for widespread mental disengagement. The longer you talk without inviting participation, the more time you give listeners to drift into self-focused rumination.

What Makes Some Meetings Worse?

The researchers also examined different types of meetings to see if certain formats amplified the self-view problem. They found that meetings involving innovation activities like brainstorming and idea sharing led to higher self-view consumption regardless of role. This makes sense: when you're trying to think creatively, you might be more conscious of how others are perceiving your ideas, leading to more self-monitoring.

Interestingly, information-sharing meetings like presentations and lectures showed slightly lower self-view engagement for listeners. Perhaps when someone else is clearly "on stage," listeners feel less social pressure to monitor their own appearance.

One factor that didn't matter: the meeting layout. Whether participants used gallery view, speaker view, or switched between layouts made no statistical difference in how often they looked at themselves. As long as self-view was on, people attended to it.

Breaking Free from the Self-View Trap

So what can you do about this? The most obvious solution is turning off self-view entirely. Most videoconferencing platforms allow you to hide your own video while remaining visible to others. This eliminates the source of self-referential information and, consequently, reduces the trigger for heightened self-awareness.

But many people resist this option. Seeing yourself provides a sense of control. You can check that you're framed properly, that your background looks professional, that you're making appropriate expressions. Especially when speaking or presenting, this feedback feels valuable.

The research suggests a more nuanced approach: be strategic about when you use self-view. Keep it on when you're speaking or presenting, where it provides useful real-time feedback. But hide it when you're primarily listening, where it becomes a distraction with no offsetting benefits.

Another strategy: if you must keep self-view on while listening, minimize and position it somewhere less prominent on your screen. Make it harder to accidentally glance at yourself. This won't eliminate the temptation entirely, but it might reduce how often you succumb to it.

For meeting organizers, the findings offer clear guidance. Promote active participation. When everyone is occasionally speaking, everyone benefits from self-view feedback without suffering extended periods of passive self-monitoring. Ask questions, invite opinions, create breakout discussions. The more you activate participants from listener to speaker mode, the better their experience will be.

Consider explicitly advising team members about self-view management. Many people don't realize that watching themselves might be undermining their meeting experience. A simple tip in the meeting invitation, "Feel free to hide self-view to stay focused," can give permission and awareness.

Think carefully about who really needs to attend each meeting. If someone will primarily be listening, perhaps the information could be shared asynchronously instead. Every passive listener you remove from a meeting is one fewer person struggling with the self-view distraction problem.

Redesigning for Human Attention

The technology companies behind videoconferencing platforms should take note too. The current default of showing self-view whenever video is on might not be optimal. What if platforms made it easier to toggle self-view on and off with a simple keyboard shortcut? What if they intelligently showed self-view when you start speaking and hid it when you stop?

Some platforms have already started innovating in this space. Features like "touch up my appearance" and beauty filters acknowledge that people care about how they look. But these cosmetic solutions don't address the fundamental attention problem. Even if you look better, you're still looking at yourself instead of engaging with the meeting.

A more radical redesign might involve showing self-view only at specific moments: when you first join, when you unmute to speak, or when you manually activate it. The rest of the time, your view would show only other participants and shared content. This would preserve the benefits of self-monitoring when speaking while eliminating the costs when listening.

Platform designers might also consider visual cues that help users recognize when they're spending too much time looking at themselves. A gentle notification after you've been fixated on self-view for a minute straight could nudge you back to the meeting content. This is similar to how some apps now remind you when you've been scrolling social media for too long.

The Deeper Question: Why Do We Care So Much?

Step back for a moment and consider why self-view affects us so powerfully. Humans are deeply social creatures. We've evolved to care intensely about how others perceive us because, for most of human history, social approval directly impacted survival. Being excluded from the group could mean death.

In modern professional contexts, the stakes are different but still significant. How colleagues perceive us affects our career prospects, our opportunities, our income. Looking professional and engaged isn't vanity. It's rational self-interest.

But videoconferencing has created an unprecedented situation. We're simultaneously experiencing ourselves as both subject and object, both the actor and the audience member watching the actor. This is fundamentally unnatural. In face-to-face interactions, you might catch your reflection occasionally, but you can't continuously watch yourself the way you can on video.

This dual consciousness is cognitively expensive. It's like trying to have a conversation while constantly checking yourself in a mirror. The conversation suffers because part of your mind is always somewhere else, always evaluating, always adjusting.

The research suggests that our minds haven't adapted to this new reality. The automatic processes that trigger self-awareness when we see ourselves work the same way online as they do in front of a physical mirror. But the contexts are completely different. A mirror is a tool you look at briefly to check your appearance before an interaction. Self-view is an ever-present observer during the interaction itself.

Looking Forward: The Hybrid Work Future

These insights become even more critical as organizations settle into permanent hybrid work models. Virtual meetings aren't going away. If anything, their prevalence is likely to increase as companies realize they can access talent anywhere and reduce real estate costs.

Some predictions suggest that 75% of meetings will be held online by 2024. If current trends continue, we're looking at a future where the majority of professional communication happens through video. Understanding how to optimize these interactions for human cognition and wellbeing isn't optional. It's essential.

The good news is that small changes can make a big difference. The research shows that the negative effects of self-view aren't inevitable. They depend on how and when you engage with your own image. By being more intentional about self-view usage, by designing meetings that keep people actively engaged, and by developing platform features that better support human attention, we can preserve the benefits of video communication while minimizing the costs.

Beyond Work: The Social Implications

It's worth noting that these effects likely extend beyond professional contexts. Many people now use video calls for socializing with family and friends, for online education, for therapy, for dating. In each context, the same basic psychology applies. Seeing yourself triggers self-awareness, which competes with engagement in the actual interaction.

This might explain why some people report feeling drained after social video calls in ways they don't after in-person gatherings. It's not just the technology or the lack of physical presence. It's the cognitive burden of constant self-monitoring.

The implications for education are particularly concerning. Students in online classes are already dealing with the challenges of learning through a screen. Adding the distraction of self-view on top of that makes the task even harder. Educators might consider explicitly addressing this in their classes, encouraging students to turn off self-view to stay focused on learning rather than on how they appear.

For therapy and counseling conducted via video, the self-awareness problem cuts both ways. Some self-awareness can be therapeutic, helping clients reflect on their emotions and reactions. But excessive self-focus can also be counterproductive, turning attention away from the therapeutic conversation and toward appearance concerns.

The Cultural Dimension

The research was conducted with European employees, which raises questions about how cultural factors might influence these effects. Different cultures have different norms around self-presentation, modesty, and appearance. In some cultures, constant self-monitoring might be more normalized and therefore less cognitively taxing. In others, it might feel even more uncomfortable and draining than what this study found.

Cross-cultural research on mirror self-recognition has found that responses to seeing oneself vary across cultures. North Americans tend to show more self-criticism when shown their reflection compared to some Asian populations. This suggests that the negative effects of self-view might be particularly pronounced in Western work contexts.

As videoconferencing becomes a truly global phenomenon, understanding these cultural nuances will become increasingly important. What works for a team based in Berlin might not work for a team in Tokyo or São Paulo.

A Call for Awareness

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this research is simply raising awareness. Many people have sensed that something about video calls feels different, more draining than in-person meetings. But they've struggled to articulate exactly what the problem is.

Now we have language for it. We can identify self-referential information consumption as a specific behavior. We can recognize heightened self-awareness as a mental state with predictable consequences. We can understand the role difference between speaking and listening as creating fundamentally different experiences.

With this awareness comes agency. Instead of passively accepting video call fatigue as an inevitable cost of modern work, we can make conscious choices about how we use the technology. We can advocate for better meeting design. We can experiment with different settings and strategies to find what works best for us.

The researchers themselves note that their study represents an early-stage exploration of this phenomenon. Much more research is needed to fully understand the nuances of self-view effects across different contexts, populations, and technologies. But we don't need to wait for perfect knowledge to start applying these insights.

The Bottom Line

Here's what we know for certain: seeing yourself during video meetings activates a state of heightened self-awareness that consumes mental resources. For listeners, this is almost purely detrimental, reducing satisfaction, productivity, and enjoyment. For speakers, the picture is more mixed, with self-view providing useful feedback that can outweigh the costs of self-awareness.

The solution isn't necessarily to eliminate self-view entirely. Rather, it's to be thoughtful and strategic about when and how you use it. Hide it when you're listening. Keep it visible when speaking or presenting. Minimize it and position it somewhere unobtrusive. Experiment to find what works best for your particular role and personality.

For organizations and leaders, the message is clear: meeting design matters. Keeping people actively engaged, alternating between speakers, inviting participation, these aren't just good practices for other reasons. They're also strategies for managing the cognitive burden of videoconferencing.

As we continue to navigate the new world of hybrid and remote work, understanding the psychology of video communication becomes increasingly crucial. The little box showing your face might seem like a minor detail, but as this research demonstrates, its effects ripple through your entire meeting experience. By paying attention to these effects and adjusting accordingly, we can work toward a future where technology serves human flourishing rather than undermining it.

Publication Details

Year of Publication: 2025
Journal: European Journal of Information Systems
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2024.2325350

About This Article

This article is based on original peer-reviewed research published in the European Journal of Information Systems. All findings, theoretical frameworks, and empirical results presented here are derived from the original scholarly work. This article provides an accessible overview for general readership. For complete methodological details, comprehensive statistical analyses, theoretical frameworks, full results including structural equation modeling, and complete academic content, readers are strongly encouraged to access the original research article by clicking the DOI link above. All intellectual property rights belong to the original authors and publisher.