You Do Not Want to See Your Own Face in Video Meetings - Settings and Framing That Reduce the Burden of Self-View

The Strangeness of Your Own Face Staying on Screen

During an online meeting, your own face sits in a corner of the screen. It stays there while you speak and while you listen. The shadows under your eyes bother you. Your expression looks stiff. Your hair is out of place. You want to focus on what is being said, but your gaze keeps returning to your own face.

When the meeting ends, you are more tired than after an in-person discussion. You did not travel anywhere, yet something has been drained.

Explaining that fatigue only as the result of staring at a screen leads to the wrong response. Online meetings contain several elements that do not exist in face-to-face conversation.

Talking On and On in Front of a Mirror

The most unusual of these is that you can see yourself.

In a face-to-face conversation, your own face is invisible. How you appear to the other person can only be imagined, and imagination gets pushed into the background by the content of the conversation. So the time you spend worrying about your appearance is limited.

Online, your face stays inside your field of view. This is the same situation as standing in front of a mirror while you talk. Imagine holding a one-hour discussion in front of a mirror, and the strangeness becomes obvious. The habit of overestimating how closely others are watching you has a name, the Spotlight Effect, and while your own image sits in view there is nothing to prompt you to doubt it.

People are also harsh judges of their own faces. An asymmetry or a habitual expression that you would never notice on someone else registers as a flaw on your own. The picture you carry of your own appearance, your Body Image, gets re-inspected every time your eyes land on the tile. When the other participants' faces sit in a grid beside yours, the pull of Social Comparison is added on top. That evaluation keeps running for the whole meeting.

The Load Added by Attention Turned Inward

Attention pointed toward yourself creates load on its own.

The processing a conversation requires is understanding what the other person says, assembling your reply, and reading the flow of the room. Add monitoring of how you look, and the resources left for the rest shrink.

Attention directed at yourself also pushes tension upward. For someone who tends to get nervous in front of others, talking while watching their own image becomes an environment where material for that nervousness is supplied without pause.

One more point differs from being in the same room: the handling of gaze. Online, looking at the other person's face takes your eyes off the camera, and on their side you appear not to be meeting their eyes. Looking into the camera makes your gaze appear aligned, but then their expression drops out of sight. That contradiction has to be resolved every time, which makes gaze harder to manage than in person.

The Part Settings Can Remove

Part of the burden can be erased through the features themselves.

• Hide your own video: most applications have a setting that hides only your own preview. You keep appearing to everyone else, but you disappear from your own field of view. It has the largest effect and is the most overlooked
• Shrink the display size: when hiding is not available, drop your own tile to its smallest size. Reducing the area it occupies weakens how strongly it pulls attention
• Window placement: arrange the layout so your own video sits at the edge of the screen, away from where your gaze naturally travels
• Camera position and light: put the camera at eye height and let light fall on the front of your face. When how you look improves, how much it bothers you drops
• Background and effects: blurring the background erases the share of the burden that comes from worrying about the state of your room

Of these, hiding your own video is the one most worth trying. The other participants see you as always, so the flow of the meeting is not affected. Many people carry this burden without knowing the setting exists.

How to Turn the Camera Off

A more fundamental response is to choose not to use the camera. That does require some adjustment to the customs of the group.

Being the only one with the camera off in a room where everyone else has it on stands out. In that case, one sentence said in advance changes how it is received: I will join by audio only today. No explanation is needed.

If you want to keep it off over the long run, framing the reason as a benefit to the group makes it go through more easily. Because my connection is not stable, or so that I can listen closely, both work.

On the other hand, in situations tied to evaluation, or in a meeting with someone you meet for the first time, having the camera on can be advantageous in practical terms. Rather than settling on a principle of on or off, deciding case by case is more realistic.

What Can Be Done from the Design Side of Meetings

If you are the one hosting a meeting, you can design it so the burden on the participants as a whole comes down.

State explicitly that the camera is optional. Put breaks into long meetings. Do not summon participants who will not speak. Do not turn material that a shared document would settle into a meeting.

Rather than acts of consideration, these are measures that raise the quality of the meeting. Participants worn down in an online meeting reliably lower the quality of the discussion.

And avoid meetings back to back. In person, the walk between rooms functions as a break; online, they can be stacked one after another. When designing how you work from home, building a few minutes of gap between meetings has a large effect.

The feeling of not wanting to see your own face is not selfishness. It is a sensible reaction to being placed in a situation people were never set up for. Erase the burden that settings can erase, and handle what remains through the design of the group. Proceeding in that order makes online meetings a little easier.