Zoom Fatigue Is Real… and how do deal with it.

Everyone has them… weeks with too many video calls, across four time zones, too many important deals, and I don’t know how many preparation sessions. This is exhausting to the extent that no amount of sleep would quickly fix it. People still join calls, still talk, still perform. But you are not actually that focused or thinking clearly anymore. And in large, complex negotiations, the distinction between thinking and performing can cost you millions.

Zoom fatigue is not a metaphor, and it is not a complaint from those who were better suited to the office. It is a documented neurological phenomenon that is being researched with growing urgency as the academic community is finally playing catch-up to date with what practitioners have been observing since 2020. It is als one of the most important unintended costs of the structural shift to virtual negotiations.

In 2025, a meta-analysis titled Zoom Fatigue in Review, which summarizes post-COVID research, found cognitive load to be one of the main processes that contribute to videoconferencing fatigue.¹ Compared to in-person fatigue, which can be severe mostly due to the physical aspect of it, Zoom fatigue is characterized by a high level of cognitive processing: maintaining eye contact with a camera that is not where the eyes of the other person are, maintaining your own visual presence, following multiple participants, and having to read intent based on the limited information. According to a study published in scientific reports in 2025, by simply switching off the self-view when engaging in video calls, the cognitive load and fatigue can be reduced significantly,² a finding that most negotiators have never heard of and almost none apply.

What My Research Discovered on the Ground

In my doctoral research on virtual large complex negotiations, cognitive load and what participants called the “tyranny of presence” emerged as one of the five major themes across all 16 interviews.³ Less informal coordination implies that any deal requires more formal structure to remain coherent, and more formal structure increases cognitive demands on the part of all participants.

One of the participants described it in a way that I appreciated:

“Information overload disguised as productivity.”

Another was even more direct:

“Negotiators are faster but not necessarily wiser. You run on adrenaline until you crash.”

Virtual negotiations eliminated the natural rhythm-breakers of in-person work: travel time, room-to-room walking, lunch breaks, which were actually breaks, and the physical distance between the negotiation and the rest of the day. The unspoken rule that you are on call at all times has given rise to what one participant described as a feeling of constant pressure.

Why This Is a Negotiation Problem, Not a Wellness Problem

I want to be cautious here, as Zoom fatigue is commonly discussed as a well-being concern and thus as something that should be handled on the periphery of the actual work. That framing misses the point.

Cognitive depletion is a strategic weakness in negotiation, in particular. Your judgment, your power to feel what is going on behind the scenes of a conversation, your power to restrain yourself where restraint is necessary, and to press yourself where pressing is necessary, all of this fails under the continued cognitive load. And the counterpart that is not as depleted as you is structurally advantaged. This is particularly pertinent in the later phases of a long deal, when the sessions are more frequent and more condensed, precisely at the time when decisions are more consequential.

What the Best Negotiators Are Doing

The executives in my research who had adapted most successfully had all developed what I would describe as “deliberate depletion management”. The former is the scheduling of micro-recovery between sessions. One participant described that they would intentionally schedule 2-min breaks between calls, and another was a proponent of time-boxing and micro-breaks to keep oneself sharp. Those two minutes of deliberate transition are not a luxury. They are a performance intervention.

The second practice is securing the most valuable calls from the schedule. The sessions where major decisions must be planned are when your cognitive ability is at its best, and with a buffer. This involves saying no to other things, which is also a negotiation skill.

The third practice is the strategic use of the hybrid model to provide your brain with a different kind of experience. In-person meetings provide a cognitively different environment that can function as a genuine reset, richer in non-verbal information, less demanding of sustained camera presence, and more naturally varied in pace.

The fourth practice is the self-view off. This is the direct result of the 2025 Scientific Reports research: the perception of oneself on the screen establishes an unending attentional demand, further increasing fatigue mindlessly. It is also worth considering how your camera setup functions as a trust signal under these conditions, which will be subject to a next article.

Managing cognitive load is not optional. It is the human factor that makes all the other factors work. The deal you are now engaged in is one that you should think over, not the thinking that remains after all the other things have had their share.

Ps. The images you see on the blogpost are made during my 1-hour morning walks in Kall (Germany).

Thanks again, Tim H.

@misc{herglotz2026dn05,
  author       = {Herglotz, Tim},
  title        = {{Zoom Fatigue Is Real… and how do deal with it.}},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {3},
  number       = {5},
  howpublished = {Tim Herglotz, entry № 05},
  url          = {https://timherglotz.com/zoom-fatigue-is-real-and-how-do-deal-with-it/}
}