Field Notes #18
What your brain looks like in back-to-back-to-back Zoom meetings; Empathy Kits that help convey what it is like to live with a neurological disorder; and a scientific-laden nudge to get outside
Hello! Most of the trees in the Hudson Valley of New York have finally burst into their yellow-green baby-leaf wonder. The air is warming up. The long winter is lifting. The season feels hopeful again. On the downside, allergies seem to be a monster this year. Runny noses, swollen eyes, general misery following any bit playing outside. Anyone have any advice for allergies?
1} What back-to-back-to-back virtual meetings do to your brain
We are still working remotely, and many friends I know who are back in the office are still on virtual meetings every day. I’m grateful for Zoom. It makes it possible to share screens and explain a project, connect across hundreds of miles, feel closer, show someone in real time what you are working on. I can’t imagine doing remote communications work without video calls.
But something happens when there are multiple back-to-back-to-back meetings on Zoom. My brain starts to feel fried. The meetings themselves are not stressful. But staring at video calls for 3 hours straight is definitely very unpleasant.
As it turns out, my brain is doing something like this:
This graphic is from the Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab, which studied the 14 volunteers who sat through meetings wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap to monitor the electrical activity in their brains.
On one day, the 14 volunteers attended four 30-minute back-to-back virtual meetings without breaks.
On another day, they had the same schedule, but the meetings were 20 minutes with 10-minute breaks.
The researchers reported:
“As we’ve seen in previous studies, in two straight hours of back-to-back meetings, the average activity of beta waves—those associated with stress—increased over time. In other words, the stress kept accumulating.
“But when participants were given a chance to rest using meditation, beta activity dropped, allowing for a ‘reset.’ This reset meant participants started their next meeting in a more relaxed state. It also meant the average level of beta waves held steady through four meetings, with no buildup of stress even as four video calls continued.”
The study also found:
For the participants deprived of breaks, researchers also noticed that the transition period between calls caused beta activity, or stress levels, to spike.
I also wonder if the stress comes from thinking thoughts like:
Is this meeting going to run over? Will I be late to the next one? Can I quickly review the agenda before it begins? Also, when am I going to go to the bathroom?
So breaks help. That’s great, and I hope more virtual meetings start to default to 45 minutes or 20 minutes, rather than 30 and 60.
But here’s one thing that made me pause about the study. The participants’ “breaks” weren’t set in reality.
Their 10-minute break was not a dash to the kitchen to heat up food, go to the bathroom while the microwave is running, and then eat quickly before the next meeting. Their break was not checking in on a sick family member upstairs and throwing a load of laundry.
No, the 10-minute breaks in the study were filled with meditation using the Headspace app.
Really. I should hope that the stress levels went down!
I wonder what a realistic study would look like. But it also makes me rethink my options. Could I do a walk or meditation between meetings? Could I help encourage shorter meetings and breaks between the meetings being the default rather than the exception?
Remembering this vivid graphic of the brain helps.
“What makes this study so powerful and relatable is that we’re effectively visualizing for people what they experience phenomenologically inside,” Bohan says. “It’s not an abstraction—quite the opposite. It's a scientific expression of the stress and fatigue people feel during back-to-backs.”
2} Empathy Kits
What is it really like to live with an illness? How can we better understand the particular frustrations of, say, living with Alzheimer’s Diseaese? At University of Virginia, students have created “Empathy Kits” — short videos with tasks that can be completed in one day that help mimic what it is like to live with a neurological disorder.
The Empathy Kits came out of the course “The Neurodegenerative Experience,” led by UVA Professor Erin Clabough. She divided students into three groups to each focus on a disorder: Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and Huntington’s Disease. Each group researched both the body/cellular level impact and the experiences of the patients, family, caregivers, and community.
The Empathy Kit for Alzheimer’s Disease, for example, describes how people with Alzheimer’s Disease commonly misplace items, which can be very frustrating and perhaps hard for their family members to understand. The video suggests you have a friend hide an item in an unexpected place — your car keys in the refrigerator, for example — and then you try to find them. That 20 minutes of searching helps you really feel how exasperating this can be and increase your empathy.
That’s just one example. The tasks are creative and easy to do.
There are short Empathy Kit videos for Parkinson’s Disease and Huntington’s Disease, too. Read a UVA story about the Empathy Kits and visit Dr. Claubough’s website for more resources.
Special thanks to UVA alumnae Jill for this story tip.
3} Scientific reasons to take this outside
To my dear friends with allergies, I’m sorry the outdoors are not a friendly place right now. I hope the pollen eases up and you can enjoy it again soon.
To everyone else who is living someone where the winter has finally sloughed off, and spring is sprouting, sunshine is beaming — let’s get outside!
Barring air pollution, I think we all understand intuitively that more time outside is good for us in countless ways.
But sometimes I could use a little scientific nudge.
Enter this meta-analysis of 143 studies, The health benefits of the great outdoors: A systematic review and meta-analysis of greenspace exposure and health outcomes, by Caoimhe Twohig-Bennett and Andy Jones published in the October 2018 edition of Environmental Research and available for free in full text online.
The authors looked at 143 studies to see how exposure to “greenspace” (open, undeveloped land with natural vegetation, or city parks, or other open outdoor public spaces) affects health outcomes. Meaning, the measurable impact on health.
Can you really quantify the benefits of being outdoors in “greenspace”?
Turns out you can. The researchers reported:
“Meta-analysis results showed increased greenspace exposure was associated with decreased salivary cortisol −0.05 (95% CI −0.07, −0.04), heart rate −2.57 (95% CI −4.30, −0.83), diastolic blood pressure −1.97 (95% CI −3.45, −0.19), HDL cholesterol −0.03 (95% CI −0.05, <-0.01), low frequency heart rate variability (HRV) −0.06 (95% CI −0.08, −0.03) and increased high frequency HRV 91.87 (95% CI 50.92, 132.82), as well as decreased risk of preterm birth 0.87 (95% CI 0.80, 0.94), type II diabetes 0.72 (95% CI 0.61, 0.85), all-cause mortality 0.69 (95% CI 0.55, 0.87), small size for gestational age 0.81 (95% CI 0.76, 0.86), cardiovascular mortality 0.84 (95% CI 0.76, 0.93), and an increased incidence of good self-reported health 1.12 (95% CI 1.05, 1.19). Incidence of stroke, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, asthma, and coronary heart disease were reduced. For several non-pooled health outcomes, between 66.7% and 100% of studies showed health-denoting associations with increased greenspace exposure including neurological and cancer-related outcomes, and respiratory mortality.”
Whew.
That’s a lot of benefit.
Here are 5 ways I’m getting outside this week:
Taking phone calls outside whenever possible
Thinking ahead to what tasks could be done without a computer, like editing a printed version of a research compilation with a pencil (cutting edge, I know), and moving the task outside
Taking short walks between meetings
Going to a Little League game
How about you?
To our journeys and healthier spring days ahead,
Brianne
Whoa! Those graphics of our brains on Zoom without a break are really powerful! I agree with you though, I’d love to see the same study with those breaks used more typically as you mention (laundry, eating, checking on family member). I wonder if the results would be somewhere in the middle- less stress, but maybe not as much less stress. To your point though, it is a good reminder that meditating on a break can be helpful.
In a typical week I take my wife and baby girl out 6 days a week, this week is atypical, my 1 year old has a contagious ailment but is recovering well... our brains feel fried too, but for now, all we can do is endure...