Feature | Gian Carla de Guzman
Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in Scientia Vol. 27 Issue №1 (The Pursuit Issue).
With the pandemic persisting, our immersion with all things digital deepens. With the world — almost too literally — accessible at our fingertips, more things come to our senses and compete for our attention. Inevitably, we experience fatigue. Here, though, we cite sources on why this happens and what we can temporarily do to reduce this exhaustion.
Essentially, digital interactions are challenging roadblocks for the brain because of their demands and restrictions. Exposure to too much information or information overload is also related to social media fatigue.
In the simplest sense, our brain becomes exhausted from digital face-to-face interactions (e.g. Zoom) because it multitasks. We can treat everything that comes into our senses as one big puzzle. Our brain is looking for something, but it can’t find this missing piece from digital interactions. It looks for this missing piece while being too focused on excess, unfamiliar pieces of stimuli.
The “missing piece” pertains to the non-verbal cues, like gestures and expressions, that our brain can easily see and interpret during in-person conversations. In digital face-to-face interactions, our evolved effortless ability to read these cues are disrupted. Instead, our brain becomes concentrated on spoken words rather than non-verbal cues, which are barely visible due to the 16:9 cropping of our companion.
Set-ups with multiple panels of screens showing the participants also overload the brain and its central vision, as it is forced to take in various sights in one go. In this case, our brain tries to meaningfully interpret the environment, but finds this task hard because its focus is scattered. During such engagements, there is also a need to be mindful of the few available cues (i.e. words, eye contact) to keep track of social interactions. Overall, the brain becomes exhausted at the additional need to focus and put things together in an interaction setting so different from what it’s used to.
Video calls that we now do from our homes also open us to more distractions. We have different home environments and circumstances that make total focus seem like a far fetched dream.
Fatigue becomes persistent as we transition to online classes and digital interactions. These can become added stressors to people, including students. However, these stressors and the growing mental health crisis are not isolated from society. We can think of it as one of the images formed from different pieces of a large systemic issue puzzle, whose gaps are filled in by other problems like accessibility, social standing, lack of crisis action, and others.
Given the broader picture, we must call for appropriate solutions from our government. But, it is still true that we’re in a pandemic and we’re facing several constraints. For now, what can we do for ourselves and our peers? With things competing for our attention at every click and tap, things can become overwhelming. Everything is online, so where else should we go? How can we help our brain fit pieces of a puzzle together at the face of what could be digital adversities?
- Hit the brakes! Unfocus. Plus, remember what focus means for others. Too much focus tires out the circuits of our brain, the body’s main engine. This impairs our decision-making and may drain our energy. “Unfocusing” lets our brain recall and process information, such as paragraphs of a long reading. However, like people, focus has different faces. For instance, stimming, or self-stimulatory behaviors like doodling, pacing, or fidgeting can actually help a classmate with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focus better. Anyone can engage in stimming, so we should accept and understand these behaviors.
- Save your energy. When overwhelmed, it is recommended to turn off your camera and/or microphone so that your brain takes in less information. Save some fuel for reading non-verbal cues.
- Rather than eliminate, reduce distractions that you can control. Given our different circumstances and abilities, it’s not always possible for everyone to remove all distractions. However, we can reduce the things competing for our attention. For example, we could block certain websites during certain hours to prevent distractions. Try to decrease the information from your surroundings that your brain needs to take in.
- Reach out to people around you. Whether it be with your family or peers, talking about feelings of distress helps you release, understand, and better organize your emotions. This also applies to learning. If your subject does meet via video calls or group chats, interacting with classmates or professors can help you understand the lesson by learning from them or asking them questions.
We hope these tips can be useful. However, we have to know that these tips are not close to the solution to nationwide distress among students. In other words, these tips are not the pieces that are perfectly fit for an incomplete puzzle. Ultimately, we must recognize that safe, accessible, and quality education — one where everyone’s mental health is nurtured — can be only achieved by us calling for proper medical solutions from the government.
