Reflections on Zoom fatigue
By Amber Foster, Ph.D. – August 31, 2020
During Spring semester, the headaches started as a pulsing at the base of my skull that soon radiated up and over my scalp. There were days—after hours of Zoom meetings—I’d find myself squinting at the screen, unable to bring the rows of faces into focus. Even after I closed the laptop, I would have trouble reading or watching TV. As I continued teaching through the summer, and now into the fall, I have begun to experience periodic vertigo. On the bad days, I feel nauseated, and I have to lie down and close my eyes until I feel like myself again.
In her famous creative non-fiction essay, “In Bed,” Joan Didion wrote of her migraines: “That in fact I spent one or two days a week almost unconscious with pain seemed a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.” As I have navigated remote instruction, I have likewise felt a sense of shame in complaining of a headache when so many others in the world are suffering. It’s easy to shrug it off as a part of our new online lives. After all, there is work to be done: synchronous classes to teach, endless emails to respond to, office hours to hold, committee meetings to attend.
All too often, Zoom feels like the fragile thread holding our society together. When Zoom went down for just a few hours recently, panic ensued—another disruption, in a year full of them.
Meanwhile, Zoom hashtags have taken over social media, and my feeds are filling up with articles on Zoom fatigue—why it happens, and how to reduce it. In the Writing Program, we have fifteen-minute individual conferences with each of our students, four times in a semester. With 45 to 57 students, that’s approximately 11-15 supplemental hours of Zoom, often taking place over two or three days. It’s deeply rewarding work—a privilege to be able to mentor each student as they become better writers and critical thinkers—but more exhausting when the conversation is mediated by a screen.
It can be easy, in the academe, to turn exhaustion into a kind of competition. “How long were you on Zoom today?” is a common topic of conversation. After one of my colleagues mentioned being on Zoom for over six hours, another announced, “you win!” to the amusement (and chagrin) of everyone in the chat.
If I have any message for my fellow online instructors, it’s that we have to be kinder to each other, this semester of all semesters. We have to remember that our students, too, have other classes on Zoom, many of them consecutive. Headaches are becoming more common in people of all ages, likely due to stress, fatigue, and increased screen time.
I still struggle to take my own advice, despite my now-daily headaches. Workaholic habits die hard, and it can feel like a dereliction of duty to step away from the laptop, even for a short while. But the first step for me has been recognizing Zoom fatigue as a very real health crisis, one we have the power to do something about. It only takes small changes, such doing more “camera off” activities or holding audio-only office hours. We can blend synchronous and asynchronous activities. By so doing, we move towards a healthier Life/Zoomlife balance—for our students, and for ourselves.