Why your group chat is making you anxious

Group chat anxiety is on the rise in our always-connected society, and it’s having a devastating impact on many Australians.

You hear a ping. Then another one. And then another one.

Your heart rate picks up a bit.

It’s one of your group chats – the one where you’re trying and failing to find a date and location for a girls’ getaway, perhaps? Or maybe it’s your footy tipping chat, with the one member who sends through 18 memes in a row during his lunch-hour toilet break. Or maybe it’s the fraught family chat, where everyone’s tiptoeing around your dad’s tone-deaf political views.

You hesitate before opening it, because once they know you’ve seen it, you’ll have to respond. The urge to throw your phone out the window grips you with irrational force.

If this feels familiar, you’re not alone. Group chat anxiety is on the rise in our always-on, always-connected society, and in spite of the ostensible benefits of being able to remain in touch with your nearest and dearest, it doesn’t always contribute to well being.

“There are a lot of reasons why being part of a group chat can make you anxious,” explains counsellor and psychotherapist Julie Sweet from Seaway Counselling.

“Some clients have shared feeling overwhelmed by group chats with multiple people (more than two or three) and that they feel pressure to respond within a tight time frame, while others have expressed frustration with the volume of notifications and have opted out as a result.”

Counsellor and psychotherapist Julie Sweet from Seaway Counselling.

Ms Sweet says she’s hearing a shift in thinking among her clients, with more people valuing meaningful, core friendships rather than attempting to maintain large, tiered social networks.

“Family dynamics is a whole separate matter,” she says. “Many clients feel persuaded to participate and remain in family group chats due to obligation.”

For Welsh author and communications expert Louisa Guise, the message that broke the camel’s back came during lockdown.

“It was around Christmas time, and I was on the sofa, and because of the pandemic, our phones had very much become an even bigger part of our lives,” she recalls.

“I was part of a lot of group chats at that time, because again, it was the only way to socialise, but this particular conversation had really ceased being a conversation at all because one person just kept going on and on about their new car. People had pretty much stopped responding, but this person was kind of just speaking into the void.”

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Something clicked for Guise. This wasn’t making her happy. It wasn’t something she was interested in. And yet she had several similar threads going all at once – a laundry list of obligatory conversations that weren’t really adding much to her life.

“I started googling, and found a lot of conversations online echoing what I was feeling,” she says.

In short, people were fed up with the group chat. Call it Covid comms-overload, call it burnout, but all over the internet, Guise was finding people stressed out by the obligation attached to maintaining several conversations at once.

Recent research out of the UK and America has found 40 per cent of respondents reported being overwhelmed by group emails and messages. A 2016 paper in The Journal of Communication found that while group chats are easy to facilitate, they can often make organising plans more difficult, due to the potential for spiralling into messy back-and-forths about time, date and place. Add to that the evidence that every notification that pings off your phone increases the amount of stress hormones like cortisol in your body, and it’s little wonder that we’re increasingly discovering group chats might be more trouble than they’re worth.

People are getting fed-up with group chats. Picture: iStock

“I began looking for evidence as to why this might be,” she explains.

“And one reason is that when we’re in the same room with another person and we can see each other, we can hear each other’s tones of voice. There are cues in the room that might guide how we present ourselves, how we talk to each other.

“Like if you’re in church, you might speak a bit differently to somebody than if you’re at a party,” Guise continues.

“In group chats, you don’t have that. You’ve got this bland kind of facade where you just really become this series of speech bubbles. In normal conversation, you’d be conveying up to 93 per cent of what you want to say not only through words themselves, but through all of these additional cues.

“The fact that they’ve been taken away and that we’re communicating via this medium that’s incredibly bland and far removed from how we talk to each other normally, means it’s really no surprise that there’s a sense of unease there, and that we might feel more anxious.”

Guise says the opportunity to misread context or tone via a group chat, particularly one with multiple members who have differing communication styles, can also heighten anxiety and, ironically, make someone feel more excluded based on misunderstandings or ‘filling in the gaps’ when it comes to meaning.

“Usually the fact that you’re filling in the gaps at all suggests that you have a negative mindset about what’s not being said to begin with,” she explains.

“So you’re probably not going to assume that the reason no one has responded to your last message is a benign one. You might think: ‘oh my God, everyone has seen it and they’re not responding.’ Conversely, you might feel the need to respond immediately as well.”

You might feel the need to respond instantly. Picture: iStock

Guise was so compelled by what she found in her research, that she reconfigured her whole approach to group chats.

“I’ve left quite a few now,” she says, saying her concentration has improved and her reliance on her phone has dropped significantly, “I’ve had to explain to some people why I was leaving, and it really wasn’t a big deal.”

“I can go hours now without being in the same room as my phone and not even noticing,” she says.

Louisa has also written a book about what she discovered through the process: How To Leave a Group Chat, although she is quick to point out it’s not a simple case of ‘group chats = bad.”

“My book is in no way trashing all instant messages and social media,” she explains. “There are lots of real benefits. Whether it’s instant messengers, online gaming or forums where people hang out virtually, you’ll get people in society who may feel they don’t fit in, or may not really gel that well with their peers, perhaps at school. Online, there is an opportunity to find the people that really are your people, and I know that’s helped a lot of people. A friend’s brother has autism, and he has lots of online friends through gaming. He finds it very difficult to make friends with people face-to-face, because for him social rules are more challenging.”

Guise also points to the opportunities for new, isolated mums to connect with one another online and find support as a benefit of instant messaging and group chats.

“Ultimately though, I think the conversation is changing around how we use our phones,” she says.

“They’ve launched ino our lives and evolved incredibly quickly, and I think now we’re beginning to realise that we have the power to hit the brakes, particularly if they’re not making us feel good.”

Originally published as Why your group chat is making you anxious