Imagine a meeting in which, for the entire hour, a small window shows you a live feed of your own face. Every time you speak, it shows you how your mouth moves. Every time you listen, it shows you what your listening looks like. Now imagine that an acquaintance had been following you around all day, holding up a mirror at arm's length. You would not call that a normal workday. You would ask them to stop.

Yet this is what most of us do on video calls, many times a week, without a second thought.

The mirror in the corner

In an in-person meeting, you almost never see yourself. You look at the people, the whiteboard, the coffee cup. Your own face is information you simply don't have, and your attention goes outward.

Video calls changed that. Almost every platform shows you a thumbnail of yourself by default. It sits there in the corner of the screen, and your eyes drift to it more often than you realize.

The cost has a name in the research. In a 2021 paper in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson described constant self-view as one of several features that make video meetings tiring. His argument is that it is unnatural to watch yourself all day, and that the mirror makes you evaluate yourself continuously.

What a mirror does to your mind

The underlying idea is older than video calls by about fifty years. In 1972, psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund proposed objective self-awareness theory. Their claim was that when your attention turns inward, toward yourself as an object, you automatically compare yourself against your standards. And when you come up short, as most of us do in some small way, you feel discomfort.

Mirrors are one of the classic ways to trigger that inward turn. Duval and Wicklund's tradition of research used them, along with cameras and recordings, precisely because seeing yourself pulls your attention onto yourself.

On a call, then, the thumbnail is not neutral. It invites you to check your hair, your posture, the slight frown you didn't know you had. And the checking competes with the actual meeting. Part of your attention is now tied up auditing yourself while you try to follow an argument about the Q3 roadmap.

This connects to something most people have felt without naming it. You say something decent, you glance at the thumbnail, and you catch your face doing something odd. Now you are thinking about your face instead of your next sentence. The thought you were building collapses.

Why your face looks wrong

There is a second reason the thumbnail bothers us, and it is a quiet one.

In a 1977 study, Mita, Dermer, and Knight showed that people tend to prefer the mirror version of their own face, while friends prefer the true version. That makes sense: you have spent your life seeing the flipped image, so it feels like you. Everyone else has spent their life seeing the unflipped one.

Many video tools show you a mirrored preview of yourself by default, but the other people on the call see the unflipped version. Your parting is on the other side. Your slightly crooked smile leans the other way. Some platforms let you switch this, though the setting is easy to miss. Either way, what you see and what others see can differ in small, unsettling ways, and the difference is easy to read as "something is off with me."

The other people on the call are not looking at your thumbnail. They see you the way friends see you. They are mostly looking at whoever is talking, and, as plenty of research on attention suggests, they are also thinking about themselves.

Does it actually matter?

It seems to, though the research is still young and worth describing carefully.

In a 2021 study, Gianluca Fauville and colleagues at Stanford built a questionnaire to measure "Zoom fatigue" and found that it had several parts, one of which was visual and physical tiredness. A later study by Rabindra Ratan and colleagues examined who reports more of it. They found that women reported more fatigue on average, and that feeling self-focused and conscious of how one looked was part of the explanation. That does not mean everyone is affected the same way. It does suggest that for some people the mirror is not a trivial annoyance.

And you do not need a study to notice your own experience. If you finish a day of calls feeling oddly wrung out, ask yourself how much of it you spent watching yourself talk.

The simple fix is a button

The remedy turns out to be almost embarrassingly small. Most platforms let you turn off the view of yourself while still being seen by everyone else. On Zoom, there is a "Hide self view" option in the menu on your video tile. In Microsoft Teams, you can hide the self-view from the same kind of menu. Google Meet lets you minimize or move your tile. The details change with updates, so look at the options on your own tile.

The important thing to understand is what hiding the thumbnail does and doesn't do. Your camera still works. Everyone else still sees you. You have only stopped watching yourself.

The first call can feel strange, almost like going without a seatbelt. You may worry that you'll slouch or that something will be stuck in your teeth. That worry fades quickly in most people's accounts, and what replaces it is a plainer feeling: you are simply in the meeting, attending to the people in it.

Your next moves

  • Hide your self-view on your very next call. Right-click or open the menu on your own tile and choose the hide option. Do it before the call starts so you don't have to decide mid-meeting.
  • Do your appearance check once, up front. Spend ten seconds before joining looking at your framing, lighting, and background. Then close the loop. You've checked, and you don't need to check again.
  • Fix your camera position. Raise the laptop so the lens is near eye level and sits roughly where your eyes naturally land. Then looking at the camera and looking at the people feels less like a trade-off.
  • Check the mirror setting. If your platform lets you flip the preview, try the unflipped version for one call. Seeing yourself as others do can reduce the "that's not my face" jolt on the occasions when you do look.
  • Notice the pull. For one day, each time you find your eyes drifting to your own thumbnail, make a small tally mark on paper. The count alone is often surprising, and it tells you whether this is a habit worth breaking.
  • Keep self-view for the moments it helps. If you're presenting something visual, or you want to check a gesture, switch it back on deliberately and off again afterward.

What you get back

The point isn't to stop caring how you come across. It's that a mirror is a poor instrument for finding out. It shows you your face, not the effect your words are having, and it spends the attention you needed for listening, thinking, and answering.

When you hide the thumbnail, that attention returns to where it belonged. You notice the colleague who is about to speak. You catch the pause that means someone is unsure. You hear the question underneath the question.

This is the part of meetings that interests us at Meeting Mortem. After a meeting, the useful reflection isn't how your face looked, but what actually happened: where you hesitated, what you held back, what you'd say differently. Meeting Mortem is a place to write that down while it's fresh, so you spend your next call looking at the people rather than at yourself. If that sounds useful, you can take a look at https://meetingmortem.lumenlabs.works whenever you like.