The reason you feel drained after a day of remote work isn't screen fatigue it's the cognitive cost of performing emotions without a body - Silicon Canals

"In a physical office, your emotions move through your whole self. You laugh and your shoulders shake. You express frustration and your hands gesture. You show empathy by leaning forward, tilting your head, touching someone's arm. The body carries emotional weight effortlessly because that's what it evolved to do. On a video call, almost all of that disappears."

"Psychologist Erving Goffman called this kind of work 'impression management' decades before Zoom existed. We are always curating how we appear to others. But his framework assumed we had our full bodies to work with. Remote work strips that assumption away and asks us to manage impressions through a keyhole."

"A 2021 study from Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab identified four key sources of fatigue in video conferencing: excessive close-up eye contact, the cognitive load of monitoring your own face, reduced physical mobility, and the heightened effort required to convey emotions through limited channels."

Remote work exhaustion extends beyond screen fatigue to a deeper source: the invisible labor of expressing emotions without full body engagement. In physical offices, emotions flow naturally through gestures, posture, and movement. Video calls compress this into a small rectangle, forcing workers to convey enthusiasm, empathy, and concern using only facial expressions and voice. This impression management through a keyhole requires significant cognitive effort. Research from Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab identifies four key fatigue sources: excessive close-up eye contact, cognitive load from self-monitoring, reduced physical mobility, and heightened effort needed for emotional expression. This disembodied performance creates profound exhaustion despite minimal physical exertion.

Read at Silicon Canals