Why Group Chats Feel So Exhausting (And What To Do About It)

Millie Rose Bannister (0:01)

You're listening to a Mamamia Podcast.

Ashani Dante (0:06)

Hi, I'm Ashani Dante, and welcome to But Are You Happy? Do you ever feel a sense of dread when you're added to yet another group chat? What's meant to make communication easier can often feel exhausting. Between the constant notifications, endless message threads, and multiple conversations happening at once, group chats can quickly become overwhelming. It's hard to know what's important, what can wait, and whether you're being rude if you don't reply.

While they're designed to keep us connected, they can also create a surprising amount of mental fatigue. There's the pressure to always be available, to keep up, and to constantly make tiny decisions like, do I reply? Can I mute without feeling guilty? In this episode, I speak with Milly Rose Bannister, Gen Z Specialist and award-winning Founder of Youth Mental Health Charity, Allknd, about why group chats can feel so draining and what we can actually do about it. We talk about what we lose when so much of our communication moves from face-to-face conversations to digital ones, the pressure to always be on, and some practical ways to make our relationship with group chats feel a little less overwhelming. Here's our conversation.

Milly, welcome to But Are You Happy? I am very excited to dive into this topic with you today.

Millie Rose Bannister (1:30)

Me too, Ashani. I'm so happy to be here with you.

Ashani Dante (1:33)

It's interesting, right? Because I feel like with group chats, it is so niche, yet it is so relatable and I think we need more airtime to talk about it. Hence why we're going to be talking about it today.

Millie Rose Bannister (1:44)

Absolutely. Niche to our generation, but a very, very real experience that I think we should unpack.

Ashani Dante (1:51)

Yeah, totally. And I'm actually really curious. For you, what are you like in group chats?

Millie Rose Bannister (1:58)

I'm a bit of a ghost-er, to be honest. I, because I'm on my phone so much for work, I see notifications as all the same thing, unless it's like a phone call from my mom or my partner. That's kind of the only outlier or my closest friends, that kind of thing, or a one-on-one text from one of those above people.

But if I'm in a group chat from three people all the way to like 10 people, which I don't really have that many groups of friends, to be honest. But I see them as part of my Slack notifications, my emails, Instagram DMs, which having kind of a business profile means that it's not really just for friendship. So I group them all together in my brain, and to me it is admin, like at its core it is admin, except for those kind of one-on-ones and those phone calls. It's just, I find it so difficult and therefore I become a bit of a ghost star, to be honest. What about you?

Ashani Dante (2:55)

Yeah, I love the archetype of the ghost star. I think we've got one. I feel like I am the lurker. So like, I am really shit with group chats. Like, I get really overwhelmed and that's why I'm like really excited to talk about it because I feel like I'm the type of person, so you know, I might have a lot of group chats going on WhatsApp and then I will like hover over it when I see there's a notification, but I don't click in because I don't want people to see that I've seen it and haven't replied yet. So I'm already overthinking everything and then I go the other way where like I want to take a step back.

So that's my archetype. We've got the goaster and the lurker.

Millie Rose Bannister (3:35)

Oh, it's so hard. I've also heard of people who, you know, get so overwhelmed by these things and you know, maybe they have like this particular anecdote I heard. She had multiple kids, she was running a business and she's trying to keep up with, you know, this group chat of all of her kind of like high school friends or whatever.

And she also had ADHD. So it's like just a recipe for disaster. And I don't even think you need to have neurodiversity or kids to experience this sort of challenge with group chats. I think it is just at its baseline overwhelming. And some people are better at diving into that than others. But she kind of got to the point where she was missing kind of like core updates in the group that weren't just like sharing, you know, about pop culture or memes. It was like, oh no, like my kid is in hospital because he broke his leg and she's missing these things. And then she's feeling this like intense guilt for not keeping up in the lives of the people that she cares about because it's wrapped up in this constant like asynchronous pinging notification situation. And so her friends were like, okay, you know what, like we understand that, like you've got a lot on your brain works a bit differently. So we're just going to create another channel called like Key Life Updates for you in particular, so you don't miss anything. But you can also stay in the other one and you can dive in when it suits you. But like we don't expect you to like trawl through hundreds of messages, you know, if you're just looking for those key updates.