Okay so last Tuesday I’m sitting in my fourth video call of the day – which honestly isn’t even that many for me anymore, my calendar looks like digital Swiss cheese – and I catch myself doing the thing again. You know the thing. Instead of paying attention to whatever Brad from marketing is saying about Q4 engagement metrics, I’m completely fixated on my own stupid face staring back at me from that little window in the corner. And not in a good way. More like watching a slow-motion car crash where I’m both the car and the tree.
I swear I didn’t used to look like this. When did my chin do that thing when I concentrate? Is that really what my “listening face” looks like to other people? Because if so, I need to have some serious conversations with everyone I’ve ever met. Tyler walked behind me during a call last week and I literally minimized my self-view because I was so embarrassed by whatever expression I was making. He didn’t even notice, but still.
This whole phenomenon – let’s call it the “Zoom gaze” because everything needs a name now – is basically psychological torture disguised as workplace efficiency. We’re forcing ourselves to stare at our own reflections for hours at a time while trying to have normal human conversations. It’s like being trapped in a funhouse mirror that follows you everywhere, except the mirror is real and also your boss can see it.
Before 2020, the only time I really looked at myself was in bathroom mirrors or when taking selfies, which you can control and delete if they’re terrible. Now I’m subjected to watching myself age in real-time under fluorescent laptop lighting while discussing budget allocations. It’s honestly cruel. I’ve seen myself make expressions I didn’t even know my face could make. Apparently when I’m thinking really hard I look like I’m either solving complex equations or smelling something awful. There’s no in-between.
The worst part isn’t even seeing yourself – it’s seeing yourself as others see you, completely unfiltered and unposed. This isn’t the carefully angled selfie version of me or the quick mirror check before leaving the house. This is raw, unedited Julie trying to look professional while internally panicking about whether that weird thing my left eyebrow does when I talk is visible to everyone.
I remember when this first started hitting me back in 2020 when we all got shoved into remote work. In conference rooms, I was confident, focused, actually listened to what people were saying. But on video calls? Suddenly I’m hyperaware of every facial expression, every awkward gesture, every unfortunate camera angle. Do I always tilt my head like a confused golden retriever when someone’s explaining something? Apparently yes, and now I can’t unsee it.
My coworker Sarah and I were commiserating about this after a particularly brutal day of back-to-back calls. “I spent an entire budget meeting counting new wrinkles around my eyes,” she told me. “Found fourteen I swear weren’t there last month. Thanks, Zoom, for the high-definition reality check nobody asked for.”
Another teammate admitted she turns off self-view entirely, which sounds great in theory until you start wondering if you’re making weird faces and nobody’s telling you. It’s this impossible catch-22 – watching yourself is distracting and exhausting, but not watching yourself creates this whole other layer of anxiety about what your face might be doing unsupervised.
The research backs up what those of us living through this already know: staring at yourself during video calls is mentally draining. It triggers the same psychological mechanisms as looking in mirrors, except we’re doing it for hours while trying to focus on work. Imagine trying to have a serious conversation while holding a handheld mirror and checking your reflection every few seconds. That’s basically what we’ve normalized.
As someone who worked on social media platform design early in my career – back when we cared more about user engagement than user psychology – I can tell you we never considered the mental health implications of constant self-viewing. We were focused on technical functionality and user experience, not on whether forcing people to watch themselves for hours might mess with their heads. Whoops.
Think about how insane this would be in person. You walk into a meeting room and one entire wall is just mirrors, so you’re watching yourself present quarterly reports while being hyperaware of your facial expressions and body language. Or imagine every conversation happening while you hold a mirror at chin level. We’d call that behavior concerning in real life, but digitally it’s just Tuesday.
I had this moment last year during a client presentation where I caught the client looking off to the side of their camera – clearly checking their own self-view while I’m explaining a complex campaign strategy. Then I started panicking about what I looked like in my little thumbnail. Did I have something in my teeth? Was my hair doing that weird thing? Instead of focusing on closing the deal, I’m spiraling about my digital appearance.
Trying to stay professionally composed while simultaneously monitoring your own video feed is genuinely exhausting. You’re performing your job while also performing being a person who looks like they’re good at their job. It’s meta-performance art nobody signed up for.
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This feeds into what psychologists call the “spotlight effect” – we vastly overestimate how much attention others pay to our appearance and behavior. Video calls amplify this because we’re literally putting ourselves in a spotlight, watching our own performance in real-time. It’s added cognitive load nobody factored into our workday expectations.
What’s really messing with my head is how the Zoom gaze is changing how I see myself. I’ve developed what I call my “video call persona” – more animated expressions, more deliberate gestures, more controlled emotional responses. I’m not being fake exactly, but I’m definitely being more performative than I would be naturally.
Just yesterday I caught myself doing this exaggerated nodding thing during a colleague’s presentation, like I needed to prove I was engaged for the camera. I’ve started making my “interested face” more pronounced because I’m worried my normal listening expression looks bored or confused. It’s exhausting trying to optimize your natural reactions for video consumption.
The whole thing has changed my home office setup too. I’ve rearranged everything not for comfort or productivity, but for better camera angles. Bought a ring light because apparently I was working in what looked like a haunted basement. My bookshelf background is carefully curated – intellectual enough to look smart, not so obscure that I seem pretentious. These aren’t vanity choices; they’re survival adaptations to a world where my professional image is inseparable from my video call appearance.
The gender dynamics make this even more complicated. My female colleagues report feeling pressure to maintain full professional grooming standards for video calls in ways that didn’t apply to in-person meetings. Meanwhile, guys I know (myself included) discovered what we actually look like when we talk and immediately started buying different hair products and upgrading our webcams.
Tyler’s sister, who works in healthcare admin, put it perfectly: “I used to get dressed thinking about how I’d be seen face-to-face by real humans. Now I get ready thinking about how I’ll look from a weird upward angle in artificial laptop lighting. I have earrings I can’t wear anymore because they create strange reflections on camera. This is not normal.”
Maybe the most disturbing part is how the Zoom gaze follows us even offline. I’ve caught myself feeling weirdly self-conscious in actual face-to-face meetings, missing the ability to monitor my own expressions. After months of watching myself through other people’s eyes, relying on just my internal sense of how I’m coming across feels insufficient. I’ve developed a dependency on my own digital reflection that I know is unhealthy but can’t seem to shake.
There are workarounds – turning off self-view, covering your thumbnail with a sticky note, using speaker view instead of gallery view. I’ve tried all of them with mixed success. What works best for me is scheduling breaks between calls where I can step away from any reflective surfaces and just exist without monitoring myself.
But maybe the most important thing is acknowledging how genuinely weird this all is. We’re participating in an unprecedented experiment in human communication – for the first time in history, we’re having extended social interactions while watching ourselves do it. Of course this creates new forms of self-consciousness. We’re not evolutionarily designed to spend hours staring at our own faces while trying to work.
So next time you catch yourself analyzing your smile mid-meeting or wondering if that’s really how you look when you’re thinking, remember you’re experiencing something uniquely modern and genuinely strange. We’re all figuring this out together, one awkward video call at a time.
And honestly? Maybe just turn off self-view. Everyone else is too busy obsessing over their own appearance to judge yours anyway.
Julie’s a social media manager in Austin who can’t scroll without analyzing engagement metrics. She writes with dark humor about influencer culture, algorithm fatigue, and the bizarre realities of working in the very industry she loves to hate. Her life is content—and that’s the problem.
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