Zoom fatigue is real — and it’s messing with more than just your head, study finds

• Videoconferencing is more exhausting than face-to-face meetings, a new study found.
• Significant physiological changes could be seen after 50 minutes of videoconferencing.
• The authors wrote that their findings could mean videoconferencing can’t replace in-person events.

Zoom fatigue might be more than just a saying.

Using brain and heart scans, researchers say they’ve found neurological evidence that videoconferencing tools are more exhausting than face-to-face events.

In October, a team of Austrian researchers published a study in Nature, which observed 35 university students by measuring their brain and heart activity with electrodes attached to their head and chest while they attended a 50-minute lecture.

Eighteen students attended the lecture in-person, while the remaining 17 watched it over a video conference.

“Based on our research results, we recommend a break after 30 minutes, because we found that with 50 minutes of videoconferencing, significant changes in physiological and subjective fatigue could be observed,” Rene Riedl, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and one of the study authors, told science news outlet IEEE Spectrum.

Participants’ brain and heart readings indicated that videoconferencing caused higher levels of fatigue, sadness, and inattentiveness than did in-person lectures.

“A major implication of our study is that videoconferencing should be considered as a possible complement to face-to-face interaction, but not as a substitute,” the authors wrote.

What sets their findings apart, they added, is that past research on Zoom fatigue has been dependent on participants self-reporting their level of exhaustion in questionnaires.

For example, a 2021 study by Gothenburg and Stanford researchers that involved over 2,700 respondents found that longer Zoom meetings weren’t the only causes of fatigue. Simply disliking using Zoom was also linked to being exhausted by it.

Videoconferencing tools such as Zoom took off after the pandemic shut offices and led to more than 40% of the US labor force working from home full-time in 2020.

However, Zoom fatigue may not be as widespread as it seems. A Pew Research Center study surveying 10,000 workers in October 2020 found that fewer than four in 10 said they were worn out by videoconferencing.

A follow-up study conducted in January 2022, involving a similar number of respondents, found that figure dropping to about one in four workers saying they were worn out.