For remote workers

Zoom fatigue and loneliness

You can spend eight hours on video calls and still feel like you haven't talked to anyone. Zoom fatigue and loneliness aren't opposites — they often go together. Here's why, and what to do about it.

Why video calls are so exhausting

Stanford researchers identified four specific mechanisms behind Zoom fatigue: excessive close-up eye contact, constant self-monitoring via your own on-screen image, reduced mobility compared to in-person conversation, and the cognitive load of reading non-verbal cues through a compressed video feed.

Each of these adds overhead that in-person conversation doesn't have. Your brain works harder to process the same amount of social information. By the end of a video-heavy day, you're more cognitively depleted than an equivalent in-person day would leave you — and you've received less of the social nourishment that in-person contact provides.

Why you still feel alone after them

Video calls are optimised for information transfer. They're good for delivering updates, discussing decisions, and running through agendas. They're poor at producing the sense of genuine human contact.

The things that make in-person interaction feel connecting — incidental touch, shared physical space, eye contact that doesn't feel performed, the ability to exist together without speaking — are largely absent from video. You can have a productive, pleasant video call with someone and come away feeling less connected than if you'd sat in silence next to them for ten minutes.

The self-monitoring problem

In face-to-face conversation, you don't see yourself. On video, you do — constantly. Research shows that seeing your own face activates self-evaluation processes that don't run during normal conversation. You monitor your expressions, adjust your appearance, notice your own reactions.

This self-monitoring is antithetical to genuine connection, which requires losing track of how you appear and actually engaging with the other person. Video makes unselfconscious conversation structurally harder.

What to do instead

Audio-only conversation removes the self-monitoring problem entirely. Without your own image on screen, you stop managing your appearance and start actually talking. Research comparing audio and video calls consistently shows that audio produces less fatigue and — counterintuitively — often greater feelings of intimacy than video.

For social calls specifically (as opposed to work meetings where visual cues matter), voice-only is almost always the better choice. It's less exhausting and more connecting.

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