How to manage zoom fatigue and reclaim your energy

Managing zoom fatigue comes down to cutting the extra cognitive load video calls put on your brain: hide your self-view, make cameras optional, shorten meetings and protect blocks of the week with no calls at all. As a manager, you set those rules for your team as well as yourself, and the people who need them most rarely ask.

Last reviewed August 2026.

Why video calls drain you more than a meeting room does

You close the last call of the day and instead of feeling finished you feel like you have run a marathon in a suit two sizes too small. Your eyes are dry and your head is foggy. The thought of one more conversation, even a pleasant one, feels physically heavy. If someone has told you to toughen up or that you are "not a people person", ignore them. This is a well-documented response to how the format works, and it has very little to do with resilience.

Researchers at Stanford who studied the phenomenon in 2021 put it down to four things. Video calls give you an unnatural amount of close-up eye contact, the kind your brain usually reserves for intense intimacy or intense conflict. You watch yourself talk all day, which is like walking around the office with someone holding a mirror in front of you. You are pinned to a small square and cannot move the way you would in a room. And your brain works harder to read non-verbal signals through a delayed, compressed image, then works harder again to send them back deliberately.

In a physical meeting you look at your notes, out the window, at the person speaking, at the clock. On camera everyone stares at everyone, all the time. That is why you can feel a low hum of fight or flight by mid-afternoon after a day of perfectly friendly conversations.

How your work personality changes the load

Not everyone on your team is tired for the same reason, and that matters when you are deciding what to change. Your work personality, the way you naturally take in information and deal with people, shapes how much video you can take and what kind of video wears you out.

Auditors and Doers tend to find the social warm-up and the lack of structure draining. They want the point and the exit, and a meeting that could have been an email costs them real energy. Evaluators and Coordinators are similar but for a different reason: without an agenda and a decision they feel the time is being wasted. Campaigners often enjoy the connection at first, then find that the energy of a room does not travel through a laptop speaker, so they work twice as hard to stay lit up. Helpers would rather have one real one-to-one than a loud group grid. Pioneers get restless in status meetings and drift. Advisors give their best in reflective, unhurried conversation, and back-to-back calls exhaust them before they have said anything useful.

The practical point is that "less video" is only half the answer. Some people need fewer calls. Others need the calls they have to be shorter and more structured, or the one-to-one kept while the all-hands goes optional. If you do not know the mix on your team, the free four-question work personality assessment is a quick way for each person to find their type, and it gives you a shared language for the conversation.

Managing zoom fatigue for yourself

Start with your own calendar, partly because you deserve it and partly because your team copies what you do rather than what you say. In rough order of payoff:

1. Hide your self-view. Every major platform lets you do it. Others still see you, but you stop performing for yourself. The relief is almost immediate, and it is the single biggest fix most people never try.
2. Turn some calls into audio. There is an unspoken rule that camera on means working. Often camera off means listening better. If nobody is sharing a screen, take the call walking. Movement and a change of scenery reset your nervous system in a way another cup of coffee does not.
3. Book 25 and 50 minutes instead of 30 and 60. Those spare minutes are for your brain to transition rather than for a refill. Stand up and look at something a few metres away so the last conversation can drain out before the next one begins.
4. Cap the number of calls in a day. Pick a number you can sustain and defend it. Four is plenty for most roles. Anything past that and the fifth call gets a worse version of you.
5. Take proper eye breaks. Every twenty minutes or so, look away from the screen for a moment. It sounds trivial and it takes the edge off the physical strain that makes the mental strain worse.

Managing zoom fatigue across your team

If you are back-to-back on camera from eight until six, your team assumes they should be too. Use your position to build the guardrails they will not build for themselves.

Put a no-meeting day or a couple of deep-work blocks in the shared calendar and hold the line on them, including for yourself. Audit the recurring meetings once a quarter and ask of each one whether it needs to be live, whether it needs video, whether it needs everyone, and whether it needs to be weekly. Say out loud that cameras are optional and mean it, because a policy nobody has heard is a policy that does not exist. Ask people directly, one at a time, which meetings drain them and which ones they would miss. You will get different answers from your Doer and your Helper, and both are right.

Watch for the quiet ones. The people suffering most from zoom fatigue are often the ones who keep their camera on and their complaints off, and by the time it shows up in their work you are months late. If you have a team-wide tool for it, Hey Compono Business gives every person a coach that knows their personality and gives you a picture of how the team fits together, which beats guessing who is quietly running on empty.

The trap new managers fall into

New managers are the worst offenders, for understandable reasons. You want to be available. You do not want anyone to think you are coasting. So the calendar fills and the camera stays on, and eighteen months later you are exhausted and wondering why your team is too. Availability is not the same as usefulness. The most useful thing you can do for a remote team is protect their thinking time and model that it is safe to protect their own.

If you are early in the role and this feels awkward to enforce, that is normal. Hey Compono's first-time manager coaching is built for exactly these moments: you talk it through by voice or text with a coach that knows how you are wired, and rehearse how to introduce a no-meeting day to a team that has never had one until you find the version that lands. If the harder problem is a boss who expects cameras on for everything, practising that pushback first is worth twenty minutes of your time.

Related reading: How to manage decision fatigue and reclaim your energy · How to manage work burnout and reclaim your energy

Frequently asked questions

Why do I feel more tired after a video call than an in-person meeting?

Video calls force your brain to work harder to read facial expressions and tone through a delayed, compressed image, while also holding unnatural close-up eye contact and watching yourself talk. In person those signals are processed effortlessly, so the same hour costs far less energy.

Is zoom fatigue a real medical condition?

It is not a formal clinical diagnosis. It is a recognised psychological phenomenon, studied by researchers including a team at Stanford, and it is linked to the specific cognitive load of video conferencing rather than to a lack of resilience or social skill.

Does my personality affect how much zoom fatigue I feel?

Yes. Auditors and Doers tend to be drained by unstructured, social calls. Campaigners and Helpers may enjoy the connection but miss the real feedback a room provides. Advisors and Evaluators tire fastest when calls are rushed or aimless. Pioneers and Coordinators lose patience with status meetings that go nowhere. Knowing your type tells you which fix to try first.

What is the quickest way to reduce zoom fatigue right now?

Hide your self-view. It removes the constant pressure to monitor your own face and expressions, which is one of the biggest sources of drain. After that, switch any call without a screen share to audio and take it walking.

Should our team always have cameras on for meetings?

No. Cameras help in small groups and sensitive conversations, but making them mandatory for everything adds a layer of performance that wears people out. Make them optional by default, say so out loud, and keep them for the meetings where seeing each other matters.