Four reasons why Zoom is so exhausting and what you can do about it

One week into shelter-in-place last year, Jeremy Bailenson was talking to a BBC reporter and had an epiphany. There's no need for us to be on Zoom," he thought. A phone call would have sufficed. This kernel of realization became an op-ed article that Bailenson penned in the Wall Street Journal titled, "Why Zoom Meetings Can Exhaust Us." Bailenson, a professor of communications and founder of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, wanted to dig deeper. So he wrote an academic paper, published Tuesday in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, that boils down four underlying causes of videoconferencing fatigue.