Zoom fatigue anyone?

I’m definitely experiencing some & have been giving some thought as to why.

Video calls for work or otherwise feel super tiring for a few reasons. The main one is that they use significantly more cognitive energy to process as:

☑️ you are not getting the body language cues you get in a physical meeting, which causes your brain to work over time to fill those gaps. Expressing/receiving emotions, such as frustration or enthusiasm, takes so much more “bandwidth”

☑️ you are sitting & staring at a screen the whole time

☑️ there are all the connection issues & other nuisances (“am I muted?”, “that background noise is maddening!”) adding to the load

☑️ our brains are tricked to think we’re in the presence of other people, but our bodies know we’re not, so we’re struggling with the dissonance.

A few things we can do to alleviate that:

✔️ be kind to ourselves & stop scheduling too many of these, they are amazing & provide us a much needed connection to the world, but even 2 long ones in a row can be too many

✔️ more written communication e.g. emails, threads on Slack, work collaboratively on docs, so less meetings are needed

✔️ switch to other “tools” during the weekend for calls (e.g. Facetime, Whatsapp), so our brains can transition between the work week and leisure/social time.

How are you coping with this?