BY LAURA ZERA
Laura Zera is a writer, IT consultant and mental health advocate. She is committed to sharing stories and information about Complex PTSD so it becomes more widely understood in every arena. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, DAME Magazine, Catapult, the Seattle Times and other places, and she is working on two books. After 17 years in Seattle, Laura recently moved home to British Columbia. Connect with her at laurazera.com or on Twitter and Instagram @laurazera.
Thanks to COVID-19, video calls aren’t going away anytime soon. But while they used to primarily consist of time with close friends or family, today there are any number of opportunities—some mandatory—to face a bunch of relative strangers two feet away on your high-resolution monitor.
Some people have adapted easily to this new scenario, albeit with screen fatigue. For those who live with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or social anxiety disorder, the visual closeness of peers and acquaintances in a video call can threaten psychological safety.
I fall into the latter category. When I click the “join” button, I’m already bracing myself for imminent intrusion into my personal space. But at least I can prepare for it, as opposed to scrolling on social media and suddenly a talking head pops up, live or otherwise. Get. Me. Outta. There.
Video calls can be problematic for several reasons. For one, someone with PTSD or anxiety often feels better when they have control over their surroundings. If I need to attend an in-person meeting, I’ll try to arrive early so I can carefully choose my seat and take a few deep breaths. In a video call, I have no control over the “room.” Everyone is right in front of me.
The perception of proximity can trigger a fight-or-flight response, something that was reported by Business Insider in this article. This isn’t a reaction that the rational, executive-functioning part of the brain has any control over: the body is flooded with a somatic survival response before the brain can even register that hey, it’s just a boring meeting to talk about disrupting the pain points in your stakeholders’ toolbox, or something like that.
Once the meeting gets rolling, a triggered person’s discomfort can continue, centered around feeling self-conscious about being seen, and therefore, judged. Again, the rational brain knows that other people in the meeting aren’t staring them down and taking inventory of their faults. But PTSD and anxiety bypass the rational pre-frontal cortex and take their marching orders from the amygdala, the brain’s fear center.
So, how can we work with this knowledge to make video meetings more comfortable and effective for everyone?
For me, it helps if I focus intently on the speaker and stay present with what they’re saying instead of following my mind in all the directions it wants to go. If that’s too hard, I back-up a step and work on my breath so that it’s slow and diaphragmatic, which facilitates better focus. Many meeting platforms allow you to select “speaker view” so you don’t see the myriad faces peering out from their boxes. Some tools allow you to turn off the “self-view,” a feature I haven’t tried out, but plan to.
On the host side, one option is to offer meeting attendees the choice of having video on or off. Ten years ago, I worked in an office where meetings used screen-share from our desktops about 80 percent of the time, and my absorption of information was much higher than it is in a video call, where anxiety can inhibit my ability to retain information.
If this idea raises host concerns about participation, an article about video calls published by the Harvard Business Review addresses participation comfort zones in the absence of body-language and social cues. The authors encourage teams to try out different engagement features in online platforms and see what works best for their group.
For hosts and participants alike, the acknowledgment that video calls can generate more than garden-variety awkwardness for some is a meaningful first step. Now, about that mute button…