Are Meeting Hangovers Draining Your Team?

Sarah stared at her laptop screen, the cursor blinking in her empty document. The quarterly planning meeting had ended two hours ago, but she couldn't shake the sense of frustration. As an ISTJ, she'd spent the entire morning preparing thoughtful questions about the budget projections, only to watch three colleagues dominate the entire discussion with tangential complaints about office coffee quality. No decisions were made. No real work got done. And now, instead of diving into the detailed analysis she'd planned for the afternoon, she found herself mentally replaying every maddening moment of that wasted hour.

Sarah is experiencing what researchers call a “meeting hangover” – and she has plenty of company. A recent study found that over 90% of knowledge workers suffer from the lingering effects of unproductive meetings, including diminished focus and productivity. More troubling still, the time workers spend in unproductive meetings has doubled since 2019, to 5 hours per week. The negative effects can persist for hours, sometimes ruining the entire workday.

But here's what the research doesn't fully capture: your personality type fundamentally shapes both how you experience meetings and how severely meeting hangovers affect you. Understanding these psychological differences is the key to transforming how the teams you manage connect and collaborate.

The Anatomy of a Meeting Hangover

Steven Rogelberg, a management professor at UNC Charlotte who coined the term “meeting hangover,” describes it as the idea that “when we have a bad meeting, we just don't leave it at the door. It sticks with us and it negatively affects our productivity.” Employees often ruminate for hours after an unproductive meeting, and they don't do it alone, either. They feel compelled to vent their frustrations with colleagues, and that creates an emotional contagion where negativity spreads through the team.

Lots of things can trigger a meeting hangover, but the most common are: 

• Irrelevant discussion topics
• Unclear agendas or objectives 
• Poor time management 
• Leaving meetings without actionable outcomes or follow-up plans
• Unequal participation (loudest voices dominate)
• Poor meeting facilitation

As you can probably guess from the list, each personality type is likely to identify a different root cause for their frustration. Consider a Sensing personality in the Myers and Briggs system (S in the four-letter code). Sensors prefer concrete information and practical applications, and may feel particularly drained when meetings wander into theoretical discussions without clear implementation steps. Intuitive types (N in the four-letter code) are generally comfortable with abstract conversations and meetings that transform into brainstorming sessions. But they might become frustrated when big-picture thinking gets bogged down by excessive operational minutiae.

Hangover symptoms might also manifest differently depending on a person’s psychological makeup. For example, Introverts (I) might experience meeting hangovers as exhaustion from overstimulation and frustration at not having adequate processing time. They might spend hours mentally rehearsing what they wished they'd said or analyzing why certain decisions felt wrong. Meanwhile, Extraverts (E) might experience meeting hangovers as restless energy – they're fired up about problems but lack productive outlets for their thoughts and concerns.

How Personality Type Shapes Meeting Experiences

The traditional approach to meeting management assumes everyone processes information and makes decisions similarly. But decades of personality research tell us otherwise. The Myers-Briggs framework has long understood that each personality has different experiences of group collaboration:

• Introverts (I)
  • Want: Quiet reflection, written agendas, time to process before responding
  • Hate: Being put on the spot, group think-alouds, meetings with no clear preparation, too many attendees
• Extraverts (E)
  • Want: Open discussion, live collaboration, verbal sharing
  • Hate: Passive listening, no interaction, limited chances to contribute out loud
• Sensors (S)
  • Want: Practical details, clear steps, relevance to day-to-day work
  • Hate: Abstract conversations, theory with no application, meetings being scheduled before their purpose is clear
• Intuitives (N)
  • Want: Big-picture thinking, brainstorming, future possibilities
  • Hate: Overly detailed topics, meetings stuck in logistics
• Thinkers (T)
  • Want: Logic, clear arguments, data-driven debate
  • Hate: Emotional undercurrents, decisions made for “harmony” over reason
• Feelers (F)
  • Want: Team harmony, collaborative tone, inclusive discussion
  • Hate: Criticism, cold logic, competitive debate
• Judgers (J)
  • Want: Structure, defined agendas, decisions by end of meeting
  • Hate: Open-ended conversations, constant topic-switching, no clear next steps, meetings that could have been emails
• Perceivers (P)
  • Want: Flexible discussion, open possibilities, exploring new ideas
  • Hate: Strict agendas, abrupt decisions without exploration, ideas being shut down prematurely

Fortunately, for managers who are trying to facilitate meetings that work for every personality type, the issues can be addressed by applying insights from personality science to meeting science. The following strategies address the root causes head-on and apply universally to every personality type.

Meeting Hangover Recovery and Prevention Strategies

1. Clarify the agenda

Whether someone thrives on structure or flexibility, an actionable agenda (shared in advance) lets people prepare in the way that suits them best. Knowing what's coming reduces stress for Judgers, Sensors and Introverts, but also helps Perceivers, Intuitives and Extraverts stick to the main talking points and contribute more meaningfully. You can make your agendas more effective by building them around specific questions. For example, instead of “new hires update” you might ask, “Where are we seeing the most delays in our onboarding process?” 

2. Encourage all voices

Effective facilitators make space for quieter team members, and those who wish to dive deeper into the topic at hand, by inviting written input before or during the meeting, and pausing rapid contributions to include time for reflection and questions. Give everyone an opportunity to contribute to the conversation. An easy way to achieve this is by assigning agenda items to different team members. Oh, and cut the guest list – too many people in the room makes it hard for everyone to feel included.

3. Move to action

Conclude every meeting with clear next steps and who is accountable. Ambiguity leads to frustration, particularly for Judging and Sensing types, but every personality benefits from knowing what happens next, when, and by whom.

4. Build in transition time

Scheduling short breaks between meetings, even just 10 minutes, helps everyone reset their focus and avoid emotional carryover. For Introverts, it's a chance to recharge; for Extraverts, a moment to process aloud or move around before jumping back in. Consider scheduling demanding meetings earlier in your day when everyone’s social energy reserves are highest.

5. Normalize post-meeting reflection

Openly debrief meetings as a group. Was it productive? What worked and what didn't? What are the root causes of frustrations, and how can they be avoided next time? The process of debriefing destigmatizes “meeting hangover” experiences and gives Feelers, in particular, space to process any lingering tension.

6. Limit unnecessary meetings

By far the most powerful fix is to meet less, and make every meeting matter. Cutting down on meeting volume protects energy for all types and allows more time for solo work, deep focus or relationship building. If a meeting agenda only needs 20 minutes, schedule 20 minutes – otherwise, Parkinson’s Law will have you talking in circles for the full allotted hour. A little time pressure keeps everyone efficient and focused. 

Final Words

Meeting hangovers don't have to be an inevitable cost of workplace collaboration. By understanding how personality differences shape our meeting experiences, we can design collaborative processes that energize rather than drain our teams. The goal isn't to eliminate all meeting friction, but to ensure that when difficulties arise, they reflect meaningful disagreements about work – not misunderstood differences in how we think and communicate that could have been prevented with a little sensitivity to our individual personality styles.

Ready to stop meeting hangovers before they start? Test your whole team quickly and easily with  TypeFinder® for the Workplace and start having better meetings.