How you can successfully overcome your zoom fatigue

Zoom fatigue is real. You and everyone else—students, teachers, and staff—spent a lot of time learning, teaching, meeting, and socializing on Zoom and other video platforms. You too have probably experienced feelings of exhaustion, tension, and irritability, as well as headaches, eye strain, and stiff neck associated with hours of zoom sessions.

Why are you experiencing this mental and physical exhaustion? Behavioral scientists point out that many aspects of zoom interactions are unnatural. Humans are social beings and since birth, we have absorbed and interpreted social cues in live interactions. Now you spend hours looking at faces without bodies, having long-lasting eye contact, or completely mistiming eye contact, staring at yourself as you speak, and trying to coordinate conversations when both verbal and nonverbal cues are distorted or delayed. It's no wonder you're exhausted!

Despite these issues, Zoom and other video platforms are still part of your daily life and are likely to simply become just another form of interaction in the future. Here are some tips for minimizing the negative effects of Zoom so you can get the most out of your academic and social experiences during and after the pandemic.

Make good use of the time between courses and meetings — take a break from the screen. When classes are taking place in person, you usually have to go from one course to the next. Treat the time between your zoom classes in a similar way. Don't jump from your zoom class to anything else on your computer or phone; instead, get up, stretch, take a short walk, look out the window.

Avoid staring at yourself by fading yourself out.One way to make Zoom interactions more like personal interactions is to remove the temptation to watch yourself. When you enter a Zoom room for a class or meeting, turn on your video and check that the video quality is okay. Then hide from your view.How do you hide yourself? Right click on your video to see the menu options. Click “Hide My Video.” You don't see yourself anymore, but your video is still visible to everyone else.

Focus on the speaker using the “Speaker View.” If you're in a lecture-style course or attending a meeting or workshop where someone is presenting, use Speaker View. The speaker view more closely mimics what your attention would personally focus on — on the speaker and presentation slides and not on everyone else in the room. The speaker view also minimizes the additional visual stimulation that comes with seeing close-ups of all faces and unique backgrounds. This extra visual stimulation is both distracting and tiring. When the format switches to discussion, switch to gallery view.

Minimize other distractions on your computer by closing other windows and programs. You're already exhausted from using Zoom, so avoid exhausting yourself further by trying to do multiple tasks at once. While we all like to think we're capable of multitasking and even good at it, we're not. We can actually only focus on one thing at a time, so we don't multitask but instead quickly switch our attention between tasks, and that's mentally exhausting. Closing other windows and programs also reduces additional visual stimulation, which is another factor that contributes to feelings of exhaustion.

Take notes with pen and paper. Writing notes by hand instead of typing them is a natural opportunity to look away from the computer. Looking at your notebook gives your eyes a break and writing with a pen encourages you to change your posture. Added bonus: Research suggests that if we're able to, we learn better when we write notes by hand. Since we can't write as fast as we can type, handwriting forces us to transcribe less and interpret more.