Mental calories: Why we feel zoom fatigue?

I’ve always wondered why so many people switch off their cameras in a zoom meeting / live class. Here’s research by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (source at the end) to explain ‘Zoom fatigue’ from a psychological perspective, and what each of us can do to fix the same:

A sense of conflict: Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense
Both the amount of eye contact we engage in on video chats, as well as the size of faces on screens is unnatural. In a normal meeting, people will variously be looking at the speaker, taking notes or looking elsewhere. But on Zoom calls, everyone is looking at everyone, all the time. Depending on your monitor size and whether you’re using an external monitor, faces on videoconferencing calls can appear too large for comfort. When someone’s face is that close to ours in real life, our brains interpret it as an intense situation that is either going to lead to mating or to conflict.

Mirror Mirror: Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing
Most video platforms show a square of what you look like on camera during a chat. But that’s unnatural. In the real world, if somebody was following you around with a mirror constantly – so that while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving feedback, getting feedback – you were seeing yourself in a mirror, that would just be crazy. When you see a reflection of yourself, you are more critical of yourself.

Get out of your chair: Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility
In-person and audio phone conversations allow humans to walk around and move. But with videoconferencing, most cameras have a set field of view, meaning a person has to generally stay in the same spot. Movement is limited in ways that are not natural.

Mental calories: the cognitive load is much higher in video chats
In regular face-to-face interaction, nonverbal communication is quite natural and each of us naturally makes and interprets gestures and nonverbal cues subconsciously. But in video chats, we have to work harder to send and receive signals. Humans have taken one of the most natural things in the world – an in-person conversation – and transformed it into something that involves a lot of thought. You’ve got to make sure that your head is framed within the centre of the video. If you want to show someone that you are agreeing with them, you have to do an exaggerated nod or put your thumbs up. That adds cognitive load as you’re using mental calories in order to communicate.

Source: https://tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nonverbal-overload/release/2