Days full of video meetings are more exhausting than if those meetings were in person. At a very basic level, we have to focus more to absorb information during virtual meetings and it’s easier to get distracted while also harder to make connections with colleagues or friends. This is what the term “Zoom fatigue” refers to. Recently, The Chronicle of Higher Education explained Zoom fatigue from the faculty’s perspective. 

Here are six helpful tips adapted from the article Zoom Exhaustion is Real. Here Are Six Ways to Find Balance and Stay Connected from Mindful.

1. Take a few moments before clicking “Start” to settle and ground your attention. Take a few breaths, feel your body on the chair, notice whatever is present in your mind and allow yourself to arrive fully to the moment at hand. 
2. Take the time to truly greet whoever is in the room with your full attention—offer your attention to each face that appears (if the group is not too big). Give yourself a moment for each person to make an impression on you, and “take in the good” as Rick Hanson would say. Give yourself an opportunity to feel what it feels like to be in the presence of another.
3. Choose “speaker view.” In Zoom, one can choose Speaker View or Gallery View;try Speaker View so that the one person who is speaking has more of your attention and the others are more peripheral. This seems to be more like sitting around a conference table where we are aware of everyone there but we direct our attention primarily to whoever is speaking. Tracking an array of 24 (or more) faces on the screen can be a challenge!
4. Resist the urge to multitask. Most of us have been known to read and fire off several emails while also sitting in a meeting. This has got to stop. Not because we need to hyper-focus on just what is happening in the meeting, but because we shouldn’t be putting additional effort into attending to anything else.
5. Try to take measured breaks between sessions. Quite often my Zoom meetings run back to back. Take better care of your precious attention and energy, and take a refreshing pause. Why not give that a try yourself?
6. And finally, remind yourself periodically that this is a new place between presence and absence that we will have to learn how to accommodate as we go forward into the uncertain future. It is both better than absence (imagine life in a pandemic without FaceTime, Zoom, Skype and the rest) and not quite as resonant as presence (do we know if mirror neurons still function over the internet like they do in person?). Let’s see if we can simultaneously refrain from high expectations without dismissing the clear benefits of online communication.