It's 2025 And We Still Get Tired On CameraIt's 2025 And We Still Get Tired On Camera
We know what causes Zoom fatigue and we know how to offset it – so why don’t we?
February 20, 2025
Five years into the normalization of videoconferencing, we still haven't cracked the conundrum of Zoom Fatigue.
Part of the challenge is purely physiological. In 2021, the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab identified four factors leading to video chat exhaustion. They were:
Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact wears you out. In a face-to-face meeting, people's gazes wander all over; when you're staring at a screen full of your colleague's faces, you're up close with every one of those people and, according to Stanford Jeremy's Bailenson, "When someone’s face is that close to ours in real life, our brains interpret it as an intense situation that is either going to lead to mating or to conflict."
Seeing yourself in real time is psychologically exhausting because you're always critiquing how you look. In other words, it's not normal to conduct your workday as though there's a mirror reflecting everything you do back to you all day.
Sitting in video meetings all day hampers the physiological need to move around. And because it's generally seen as unprofessional to wander in and out of frame during a meeting, we're all spending more time sitting very still in one spot.
We have to work harder to interpret our colleagues' intentions on video. According to Bailenson, “You’ve got to make sure that your head is framed within the center of the video. If you want to show someone that you are agreeing with them, you have to do an exaggerated nod or put your thumbs up. That adds cognitive load as you’re using mental calories in order to communicate.”
Right around the same time, Microsoft's researchers used brain scans to confirm that indeed, back-to-back virtual meetings are fatiguing, but taking breaks can offset the wear and tear: “Our research shows breaks are important, not just to make us less exhausted by the end of the day, but to actually improve our ability to focus and engage while in those meetings,” said Michael Bohan, then-senior director of Microsoft’s Human Factors Engineering group,
Mitigating Zoom fatigue comes down to preventive measures -- establishing some meetings as camera-off, moving around, taking breaks, and just asking whether this meeting could be an email.
We've had four years since that research came out -- four years in which to codify workplace conventions for video meetings so all participants can maximize collaboration and minimize Zoom fatigue.
Yet LiveCareer’s most recent Workplace Technology Survey reported three out of every four respondents were dealing with Zoom fatigue: 30% reported they "sometimes" experienced the drain from virtual meetings, while another 45% said they were affected "often" or "always."
This finding stood out because it illustrates something about technological adoption: even when there are best practices that offset a negative outcome from using a specific technology, the existence of those practices is no guarantee they'll be adopted by the people who could use them the most. Even some of the technological attempts to reduce the issue, such as using avatars in lieu of hyperstimulated humans, appear not to have done much to alleviate the problem for a majority of workers.
Zoom fatigue is a handy reminder that it is not always easy to engineer a technological solution to a technological problem. Sometimes human behavior persists -- no matter how tired we are of it or how tired it makes us.
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