How to overcome webcam insecurity

Article originally posted on the Vosaic blog

Workplaces in nearly every industry have adopted the use of video in one way or another during COVID-19, and it’s no different in higher education. By recording yourself and sharing those videos with your leaders, colleagues, students, and families, you can continue the education cycle easily from home. Sounds great, right?

If you just read that paragraph and cringed at the thought of recording yourself, you’re not alone. Insecurity on camera is relatively universal across practices and professions, but it’s not necessarily uniform in every context.

If you use social media, you might not think twice about sending a selfie to a friend via Snapchat, posting a video on your Instagram story, or recording yourself trying the latest TikTok dance challenge.

However, the pressure becomes far more significant when you’re recording a video with important content for student learning.

In some cases, this comes with a greater level of importance and heavier consequences for mistakes. While it’s crucial to adjust your tone and approach for different contexts, it’s possible to record high-stakes video without a high level of anxiety and discomfort. The best way to start is by understanding what makes us feel so uneasy on camera.

Simply pressing the “record” button can lead to a rush of anxiety that causes you to forget everything you’d planned to say and do on camera. The fear and anxiety you experience when recording yourself might seem irrational and a bit silly at times, but there’s an actual, scientific explanation for how you feel on camera.

For some, the act of being recorded is enough to trigger their fight-or-flight response, which is the body’s natural reaction to danger. This response is activated whenever you experience stress, which is determined by the brain’s sensory input and processing center. Though you may not be in any real danger, not knowing who will watch the video or what they will think of you is enough to stimulate the response.

Once you enter fight-or-flight mode, your body reacts in many ways: your neck and back tense up, legs and hands begin to shake, blood pressure spikes, and your pupils dilate. Your brain becomes so occupied by the jump in cortisol that it becomes hard to remember words, which explains why so many people freeze up during presentations and recordings.

However, there’s a bright side to all of this. Just as you can trick your brain into thinking that you’re in danger when you record yourself, you can also trick it into thinking everything is fine. One tip is to press record, then give yourself some time before starting your presentation, as you can always trim down or edit videos. By taking this brief pause, you have an opportunity to gather your thoughts and get comfortable with the recording.

To ease your body’s fight-or-flight response, try taking some deep breaths before starting your presentation. Though this method might sound simple, studies show that breathing techniques can extinguish stress and anxiety.

Getting over the fear of pressing “record” is half the battle in becoming comfortable on camera. The next step is becoming comfortable watching yourself on camera.

Many people find the process of recording themselves giving a speech or presentation to be incredibly time-consuming. There’s an obsession with recording and re-recording until everything is just right. No matter the content, it’s easy to spend 30 minutes capturing a minute-long recording. This time-consuming obsession is partially due to the ability to re-record after making a mistake, a luxury that’s not available when presenting in person.

The heightened attention to flaws is also partially due to something called confirmation bias. Confirmation biases draw our attention to evidence that proves something we already believe to be true. If you walk out of a presentation or performance convinced that you stuttered, forgot your words, or came across as awkward, that’s probably all you’ll see when you watch the video.

This subconscious attention to flaws drives an obsession with perfection and an aversion to presentations altogether. It can be detrimental if you’re watching a video for self-reflection and improvement, as your focus won’t be on relevant details.

Confirmation bias also comes into play when observing our physical appearance on camera. Have you ever seen a photo of yourself that you didn’t like, even though your friends or family insisted that it looked fine? If you had insecurities about your physical appearance, you may have subconsciously scoured the photo for flaws that others likely wouldn’t notice.

There’s also a psychological factor at play, called the mere exposure effect. Essentially, individuals become more familiar with and prefer things that they are exposed to more often.

When looking at ourselves in the mirror or a front-facing camera, what we see and become familiar with is flipped. When we see the resulting, unflipped photo or video, it seems to be contrary to our normal self-image. Because of the mere exposure effect, we may find unflipped images of ourselves to appear unappealing compared to what we’re used to seeing.

It’s common for people to cringe when they hear a recording of their voice because it doesn’t match their perception of how they sound. Just as others see you differently than you see yourself in the mirror, they also hear your voice differently than how you hear it in your head. This effect is because the anatomy of the ear, the way sound enters the ear, and how the human brain processes it.

There are three little bones in the middle of your ear called ossicles that help process sound waves and affect how the vibrations are transmitted to your cochlea, which sends noise into the brain to be processed. These ossicles vibrate more when you talk because the sound is closer to your ear. The more the ossicles vibrate, the lower the sound seems in your head. You get used to this lower pitch, which is why your voice sounds higher when you hear it in videos and recordings. The reality is that the voice you hear in videos and recordings is what your voice actually sounds like to others.

But why does the way we truly sound tend to bother us so much? Again, it’s the mere exposure effect. We’ve grown familiar with the pitch of our voice when we talk, so it’s uncomfortable to hear a voice that’s contrary to our existing expectation.

Dr. Silke Paulmann, a psychologist at the University of Essex, says, “I would speculate that the fact that we sound more high-pitched than what we think leads us to cringe as it doesn’t meet our internal expectations; our voice plays a massive role in forming our identity and I guess no one likes to realise that you’re not really who you think you are.”