The work of a Content Moderator requires focus and concentration to accurately identify and tag high volumes of non-compliant user-generated content.
There is also the additional cognitive load of adhering to policy and community standards, while being subjected to rigorous quality standards. This intense emotional labor can lead to exhaustion, especially when it involves constant surface acting.
In addition, they must also manage the emotional impact of viewing graphic or disturbing content within these high-stress work environments. So, how can psychological demands and workplace pressures be managed to help support moderator focus and productivity?
Building Safe and Supportive Work Conditions
According to the recently published Framework to Create Mentally Healthy Workplaces, creating a supportive work environment is an essential part of a wider strategy to protect mental health, alongside preventative approaches to reduce psychosocial harm or injury in the first place.
This includes practical strategies like:
- Encouraging regular breaks to decompress
- Helping moderators in setting boundaries between work and personal life
- Facilitating peer support networks where shared experiences can be validated
Strengthening Self-Regulation and Resilience
Alongside environmental supports, enhancing personal emotional resilience in the workplace is essential. This involves developing key psychological skills like self-regulation to manage reactions in real-time and improving emotional intelligence to better understand and address the challenging emotional landscape of the job.
These skills are fundamental for long-term career resilience in the moderation field. Preventative programs should support employees to understand and withstand the impact of stressors, thus helping to reduce the development and progression of mental health challenges.
This could take the form of stress and burnout awareness training, mental health or workplace stress psychoeducation. Research indicates that having access to mental health supports alleviates emotional exhaustion, allowing moderators to sustain better focus and improved cognitive function.
Furthermore, resilience and psychological safety training equips moderators with skills to manage work-related stress more effectively, minimising distractions and maintaining task-oriented concentration.
In addition to educational training, it is also important to provide evidence-based psychological interventions shown in the research to reduce the impact of stress.
A metareview of workplace interventions found good evidence for the effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), mindfulness, and stress management strategies as a preventative strategy, with moderate to large effects on mental health and quality of life measures.
In fact, mindfulness and CBT-based approaches have been found to be the most consistently effective interventions to improve employee subjective well-being.
Enhancing Cognitive Function Through Mindfulness
A systematic review of mindfulness-based stress management interventions found a positive impact not only on overall well-being but also on cognitive performance, both valuable assets in Content Moderator work.
Additionally, an MBSR study found that practicing mindfulness reduced levels of cortisol and other stress hormones, essentially interrupting the stress cycle. Reducing the negative impacts of stress on the brain can improve overall cognitive function and concentration.
Improving Attentional Control and Focus
According to recent studies, regular mindfulness practice has also been shown to improve cognitive functioning and attentional control, including sustained attention and working memory capacity.
Attention is cultivated using meditative practices that focus on present-moment experiences and enhancing cognitive control. It strengthens neural connections and pathways in the brain for improved flexibility and adaptability, as well as attention and emotion regulation.
Encouraging Healthier Emotional Processing
Essentially, it switches participants from “doing mode” to “being mode”, which supports healthier emotional processing like deep acting and is more associated with relaxation and less with stress activation. Individuals are also more likely to get into “the zone” or “flow” of work, making them work more effectively.
A Trauma-Informed Mindfulness Approach
There has been considerable research on the effectiveness of resilience and stress management training for the general working population.
However, to address more high-risk roles, a 2023 systematic review suggests some potential of mind-body exercise programs (yoga and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) for trauma-exposed groups (i.e. veterans, natural disaster survivors), however found yoga to have a larger effect size.
In fact, recent studies have found that mindfulness-based interventions can have a negative impact on individuals with anxiety or trauma.
Adapting Mindfulness for Trauma Exposure
As previously stated, mindfulness helps improve attentional control and cognitive performance, however it also increases awareness of internal and external experiences. This may be problematic for those impacted by trauma, in particular Content Moderators who may find the experience of increased body awareness activating.
During mindfulness training, participants are guided to increase their attention to their inner world, which, if there is a lot of stress, anxiety, or trauma present, can cause distress and exacerbate symptoms.
Their nervous systems may be dysregulated due to perceived threats to safety, or harbouring traumatic memories or sensations from their work, which they have distracted themselves from as a way of coping. A recent qualitative study found distraction to be a common technique used by moderators during and after work.
This is why specific techniques are required to gently approach painful experiences to facilitate healing. Trauma-informed mindfulness is an alternative approach that works by avoiding triggers and overwhelm while working with the individuals to process painful experiences.
Mindfulness has so many benefits, including integration of different regions and networks in the brain, which aid in trauma processing.
Therefore, trauma-informed mindfulness may be very helpful for Content Moderators, who are at greater risk of:
- vicarious trauma
- compassion fatigue
- burnout.
It may be safer to modify meditation practices by focusing on grounding and anchoring techniques and ways to balance the nervous system, which may become impacted by reviewing content.
Safe Grounding and Anchoring Techniques
Other safe practices include mindfully listening to music, observing the space, objects and colours around you and movement with present moment awareness, such as yoga, Qi Gong, or Tai Chi instead of still, seated meditations.
Supporting Sustainable Engagement in Moderation
While mindfulness and CBT-based interventions focused on reducing stress may be helpful in general workplace environments, content moderation wellbeing requires a more trauma-informed approach to support their wellbeing and allow them to focus on producing good quality work.
The objective is to move past simple stress reduction and help moderators find genuine job satisfaction and purpose, also known as eudaimonic well-being. With proactive strategies like job crafting, moderators can reshape their work experience and improve their overall workplace happiness.
Recent studies highlight the need for psychoeducation and trauma-informed care to help mitigate the challenges of their work. However, more research is needed on content moderator populations to understand their nuanced experience of work and what type of interventions work most effectively for stress, trauma and burnout.
Zevo Accreditation Program
Advance your skills with the Zevo Accreditation Program (ZAP), a CPD-approved certification for mental health professionals in Trust & Safety. Learn best-practice, evidence-based interventions to support Content Moderators and tackle risks like vicarious trauma and burnout.
