Why Talking to Your Phone Feels So Awkward, and How to Get Past It

If talking to your phone feels awkward, there are two well-studied reasons. The face on the screen is not the face you're used to, and the voice in the recording is not the voice you hear when you speak. Neither tells you anything about how you come across. Both fade with exposure, and you can sidestep most of it by hiding the preview and not rewatching for the first few weeks.

The awkwardness is the most common reason people give up a video journal, so it's worth understanding properly rather than pushing through.

You're used to your mirror image, not your face

In 1977, Theodore Mita, Marshall Dermer and Jeffrey Knight printed portraits of their participants twice: once as the camera saw them, and once flipped left to right. They then asked each participant, and a close friend, which print they preferred. People tended to prefer the mirror-image version of themselves; their friends tended to prefer the true image. The paper appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title "Reversed facial images and the mere-exposure hypothesis."

The explanation the authors gave is familiarity. You see yourself almost entirely in mirrors, so the flipped face is the one you know. Everyone else sees the other version. Faces aren't perfectly symmetrical, so the unflipped one looks subtly wrong to you — a parting on the wrong side, a smile that leans the other way — and "wrong" is easily read as "worse."

This matters for a video journal more than for a photo, because many phones show a mirrored preview while you record and then save the unflipped version. You talk to the face you know and play back the one you don't. If the playback makes you wince, a good part of that wince is this effect.

Your recorded voice is the real one

The voice problem has a physical cause. When you speak, you hear yourself partly through the bones of your skull, which carries lower frequencies better than air does. A recording only has the air part, so it sounds thinner and higher than the voice in your head. Psychologists have studied the discomfort since at least Philip Holzman and Clyde Rousey's 1966 paper "The voice as a percept," which described people's reactions to hearing their recorded voices as a confrontation with themselves.

The interesting twist came in 2013. Susan Hughes and Marissa Harrison played 80 people a set of recordings of voices counting from one to ten, with each participant's own voice slipped in without their knowing. Participants rated their own voice as more attractive than other people did, published in Perception as "I like my voice better." The authors' reading: when people don't know it's them, they don't hate their voice at all. The discomfort comes from knowing it's you and noticing the gap with what you expected.

That's useful to know on day three of a journal. The recording isn't revealing a flaw. It's revealing a mismatch, and mismatches fade with exposure.

Seeing yourself while you talk is tiring

The third source of awkwardness is watching yourself as you speak, and it got a lot of attention during the pandemic.

In 2023, Géraldine Fauville and colleagues at Stanford published a survey of more than 10,000 people about video-call fatigue in Computers in Human Behavior Reports. One of the strongest predictors of fatigue was what they called mirror anxiety: the strain of seeing your own face for long stretches. Women reported more of it than men, and mirror anxiety explained a large part of why women reported more fatigue overall.

A journal entry is not a meeting — it's thirty seconds, not an hour — but the mechanism is the same. When your own face is on screen, part of your attention is spent monitoring it, and that attention isn't going into what you're saying.

How to make talking to camera feel less awkward

None of these needs you to become more confident. They remove the things that cause the awkwardness.

1. Hide the preview, or look past it. If your app lets you cover or minimise the self-view, do it. If not, look at the camera lens rather than the screen. You'll stop monitoring your face, and you'll be looking at the viewer when you watch it back.
2. Talk to one specific person. Future you is a fine choice (it's how a video message to your future self works). Researchers who had students talk about a hard experience into a tape recorder told them it might "seem awkward at first" but that "most people get comfortable with it after a few minutes," and asked them to talk "as if they were talking to themselves" (Lyubomirsky, Sousa & Dickerhoof, 2006). That's an instruction rather than a finding, but it's a sensible one.
3. Try "you" instead of "I." In seven studies, Ethan Kross and colleagues (2014) found that people who talked themselves through a stressful task using their own name or "you" — rather than "I" — gave better speeches as judged by observers and felt less distress afterwards. That research is about silent self-talk before a speech, not journaling, so treat it as something worth trying rather than a proven fix. "You were tired today, and you still went" is a surprisingly easy sentence to say to a camera.
4. Same place, same light, every time. Most of the self-scrutiny on day one is about the setting: the lighting, the background, the angle. Decide once, and you stop re-deciding.
5. Don't rewatch for the first month. The early clips are where the mirror and voice effects are strongest, because nothing is familiar yet. Rewatching them daily mostly trains you to perform. Watch them at the end, side by side with the latest one, and they'll read as a record rather than a performance.
6. Keep it short. Thirty seconds is short enough that self-consciousness doesn't have time to build. Long entries give you more time to notice yourself.

When you do watch it back

When the time comes to rewatch, one finding from clinical psychology is worth borrowing. In a study of people with social anxiety, Harvey, Clark, Ehlers and Rapee (2000) had participants give a speech and then watch it on video. Half were first asked to predict in detail what they'd see, picture it, and then watch the video as though they were watching a stranger. That group rated their performance more favourably than the group who simply watched.

Their participants were socially anxious people watching a stressful speech, not journal writers, and the setting was a lab. But the technique transfers cheaply: before you play an old entry, guess what you'll see. Then watch it as if it were someone else's. Most people find the gap between the guess and the clip is in their favour.

FAQ

Why do I look weird on video?

Mostly because you're used to your mirror image. In a 1977 study, people preferred mirror-flipped photos of themselves while their friends preferred the true image. Many phones show you a mirrored preview and then save the unflipped video, so the playback looks subtly wrong to you even though it's the face everyone else sees.

Why do I hate the sound of my recorded voice?

When you speak you hear your voice partly through bone, which adds lower frequencies, so a recording sounds thinner than you expect. In a 2013 study, people who didn't know their own voice was among the recordings rated it more attractive than others did, which suggests the discomfort comes from the mismatch, not the voice.

Does it get less awkward over time?

For most people, yes — both the mirror and voice effects are about familiarity, and familiarity grows with exposure. It helps to hide the preview while recording and to avoid rewatching early entries every day.

Should I look at the screen or the camera?

The camera lens. You stop watching your own face, which is the main source of self-consciousness, and the recording looks as if you're speaking to the viewer.

Sources

• Mita, T. H., Dermer, M., & Knight, J. (1977). Reversed facial images and the mere-exposure hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(8), 597–601. Summarised in Psychology Today.
• Amestoy, A., Bouvard, M. P., & Cazalets, J.-R. (2010). Left-right facial orientation of familiar faces: Developmental aspects of "the mere exposure hypothesis". Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 39.
• Holzman, P. S., & Rousey, C. (1966). The voice as a percept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 79–86.
• Hughes, S. M., & Harrison, M. A. (2013). "I like my voice better": Self-enhancement bias in perceptions of voice attractiveness. Perception, 42(9), 941–949.
• Fauville, G., Luo, M., Queiroz, A. C. M., Lee, A., Bailenson, J. N., & Hancock, J. (2023). Video-conferencing usage dynamics and nonverbal mechanisms exacerbate Zoom Fatigue, particularly for women. Computers in Human Behavior Reports.
• Lyubomirsky, S., Sousa, L., & Dickerhoof, R. (2006). The costs and benefits of writing, talking, and thinking about life's triumphs and defeats. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(4), 692–708.
• Kross, E., et al. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324.
• Harvey, A. G., Clark, D. M., Ehlers, A., & Rapee, R. M. (2000). Social anxiety and self-impression: Cognitive preparation enhances the beneficial effects of video feedback following a stressful social task. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38(12), 1183–1192.

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