My coworker and I sit in the exact same meetings. Same calls, same screens, same little grid of faces. By mid-afternoon she’s breezing through her to-do list, and I’m lying on my bed staring at the ceiling, trying to work out where my entire personality went.
For the longest time I assumed I was just doing it wrong. And it doesn’t help that I seem to be the only one. I think I’m officially the no-meetings guy now. Just two weeks ago, our project manager seemed genuinely surprised when I voluntarily agreed to a meeting.
The point is that nobody seems to find meetings as draining as I do. So let this article be my long-overdue answer to all of them!
Here’s my observation: the environment is identical but the experience isn’t. So, the difference isn’t the technology. It’s us! And once I started reading the research, it turned out scientists have been quietly mapping exactly why.
Let’s get into it.
“Zoom Fatigue” Is Real, but It Doesn’t Hit Everyone Equally
No, you’re not imagining it. “Zoom fatigue” went from a COVID-era meme to a measurable thing remarkably fast.
In 2021, researchers at Stanford and the University of Gothenburg built an actual instrument to measure it, charmingly named Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale.
They landed on five distinct flavors of video-call tiredness based on interviews and data from over 2,700 people. Here are the types of fatigue:
- General fatigue: The plain “I feel exhausted” kind.
- Visual fatigue: Sore, dry, blurry eyes.
- Social fatigue: That craving to be left completely alone afterward.
- Motivational fatigue: Dreading the next task, not feeling like doing anything.
- Emotional fatigue: Feeling drained, irritable, moody.
So two people can both say “Zoom is exhausting” but mean completely different things.
The same research also found what you’d expect: more meetings, longer meetings, and back-to-back scheduling all increase fatigue further.
Hold that thought, because it comes back later.
The Cognitive Load Theory: Your Brain Is Doing Overtime
So why is a video call more tiring than just, you know, talking to a person?
A strong explanation comes from Stanford communication professor Jeremy Bailenson, who argues that video chat quietly turns a natural, effortless conversation into a high-effort, deliberate cognitive task.
Think about what your brain is juggling in a video conference:
- Manufacturing nonverbal cues. In person, you nod and gesture automatically. On video, you over-nod, hold a thumbs-up for an extra beat, and monitor yourself consciously.
- Decoding cues that no longer mean anything. When someone on the grid glances sideways, your brain still reaches for an interpretation. Are they bored? Was it your presentation?! And it turns out that their cat just walked in. The signals are perceptually real but socially meaningless. Still, they go through your head and sorting them out is work.
- Coping with delay. Even small lags disrupt conversational rhythm and increase mental effort. Here’s an older study on video vs. audio calls!
- Being “on” the entire time. You’re aware you’re being watched, so attention becomes performance.
A 2022 technical review catalogues even more of these little tolls: listening effort from compressed audio, the strain of re-establishing a dropped connection, and the low-grade stress of fighting the software itself. None of this feels dramatic in isolation, but it adds up. (Note that the field is relatively new and these aren’t necessarily facts, but possibilities.)
And people differ in how much of this load they can handle before fatigue kicks in. That’s the first real clue as to why my coworker is fine and I’m face-down on a duvet.
The Hidden Cost of Seeing Yourself All Day
Here’s something deceptively simple: on Zoom, you’re not just talking. You’re talking and watching yourself talk.
Bailenson puts it perfectly: imagine someone following you all the live-long day holding up a mirror that you have to look into.
Crazy, right? And yet that’s the default setting on basically every video platform.
This matters because of the “mirror effect”: seeing yourself increases self-evaluation. Over hours of meetings, that becomes a steady cognitive and emotional drain.
And it gets even more specific! A 2022 study found that facial dissatisfaction was linked to higher Zoom fatigue, and that women reported higher fatigue levels on average.
The point isn’t that anyone is “more sensitive.” It’s that self-view affects people differently depending on how they react to their own image. If you don’t care, it’s invisible. If you do, it quietly taxes you all day. (There’s a reason cosmetic surgery got a boost during the pandemic. People were studying themselves more than they ever had.)
The good news: this is one of the easiest things to fix. I’ll get to that.
Personality Plays a Part (but Not the Part You’d Expect)
The tidy story everyone wants to tell is “introverts hate Zoom, extroverts love it.” The evidence is more interesting than that. The truth is that different personalities seem to get tired through different means.
Extroverts may feel less rewarded by virtual interaction compared to real-life energy. Introverts may feel more overstimulated by constant visual presence and attention.
Other traits matter too, like social anxiety or sensitivity to evaluation.
So, it’s not about one group struggling more. It’s about different people draining in different ways.
Which, frankly, is a kinder explanation than the one I’d been telling myself.
It’s Not You. It’s the Room. (Sometimes)
A meta-analysis on Zoom fatigue says that some of the load comes from your physical setup. (Phew! That’s often easier to change than your personality.)
According to the analysis, one important factor is the “feeling of being trapped.” Your camera has a fixed field of view, your keyboard can’t move a lot, and so you sit frozen in a one-meter box for hours on end.
In real meetings, you move naturally. You shift, stretch, pace, or briefly disengage. There’s also solid evidence that movement actually helps us think. Video calls are quietly confiscating that.
Other environmental factors plausibly add to the pile:
- Visual clutter behind you (and behind everyone else) is more for your brain to process.
- Meeting size: Aa grid of 20 people is cognitively heavier than a 1-on-1.
- Every technical friction is also a little jolt of stress. Think about the lag, the “you’re on mute,” the frozen frames, etc.
Calm, blurred, or nature-y virtual backgrounds may help some people feel less overwhelmed, but evidence is still limited.
Try all of this for yourself and see how it goes!
Why Some People Hit the Wall Faster
Two runners on the same trail don’t tire at the same time, because they have different physical fatigue thresholds. The same is true here: a tank of cognitive endurance empties at different speeds for different people.
A few things determine how full your tank starts out and how fast it drains:
- The sheer volume. This one’s confirmed across studies: more meetings, longer meetings, and less recovery time between them all push fatigue up.
- Existing stress. If you walk into the day already stretched thin, the calls naturally cost more.
- Burnout. And here’s a nasty little loop: fatigue feeds burnout, and burnout makes you more vulnerable to fatigue. Round and round it goes.
- Recovery. It’s not just how many calls, but whether you get any gap between them to reset. The back-to-back schedule is a silent killer here.
And your threshold is set by a messy combination of personality, self-consciousness, cognitive style, workload, and yes, the occasional bad night.
What This Means If You Manage People
Zoom out from individual psychology for a second (pun absolutely intended), because there’s a real implication for teams here.
Most organizations quietly assume everyone experiences virtual meetings the same way. If the research says anything, it’s that they don’t. And that assumption has consequences:
- Camera-on policies land differently on different people. A field experiment found that being required to keep cameras on increased fatigue. The effect was also stronger for women and for more junior employees.
- Meeting-heavy cultures fall hardest on the people with lower thresholds. The same calendar that energizes one person quietly grinds down another.
- One-size-fits-all norms start to look questionable. If fatigue tolerance genuinely varies, then so should the rules.
If you manage a team, you don’t need a grand policy overhaul. Let people turn off their cameras, defend gaps between meetings, default to “hide self-view,” and occasionally ask whether something can be solved asynchronously.
If you’re part of a team and looking to lower your Zoom fatigue, read on!
A Few Tips to Avoid Zoom Fatigue
I’d hate to leave you only diagnosed and not treated. So, here are the fixes that come straight out of the research. Most of them are quick, too:
- Hide your self-view. Right-click your own square, hit “hide” or “remove,” and let the mirror go. (Or shrink, depending on what platform you’re on.) Once your face is framed properly, you genuinely don’t need to keep watching it. This is the single highest-leverage change for a lot of people.
- Make room to move. An external camera placed a little farther back lets you lean, shift, and doodle like you would in a real meeting. Movement is a feature, not a distraction.
- Take audio-only breaks. During long stretches, turn your camera off and turn your body away from the screen for a few minutes. I like to stretch out off-camera, maybe even dance a little!
- Shrink the window. Take Zoom out of full-screen and make the grid smaller, so faces aren’t looming over you at unnatural, intimate size.
- Protect the gaps. Where you can, refuse back-to-back meetings. Even five minutes between calls (ideally supplemented by a couple of steps and stretches) lets the tank refill a little.
TL;DR
For a long time, I assumed I was just worse at meetings than everyone else. The research suggests something simpler: people don’t experience video calls the same way.
- Zoom fatigue is real and measurable, with multiple distinct types
- Video calls increase cognitive load in subtle but constant ways
- Self-view adds a hidden layer of self-monitoring stress
- Personality and sensitivity shape the experience
- Environment and meeting structure matter a lot
- Recovery time is just as important as workload
So why does the same meeting flatten you but not your coworker? Because your brains are running different software. (Sounds obvious, right?)
Go hide your self-view now. I’ll be doing the same!