Why video calls are different
What to do about it
Most video call eye strain is addressable with a few specific changes — some to your setup, some to how you run the calls themselves.
Put your camera at eye level. A laptop sitting on a desk puts the camera below eye level, which forces you to angle your eyes downward and open them wider. Wider open eyes have more exposed eye surface and lose tear film faster. A laptop stand or external monitor fixes this.
Increase your screen distance. People tend to sit closer to a laptop during calls than during regular work. Try to maintain 50–70cm — further than it might feel comfortable at first, but significantly easier on the focusing muscles.
Hide your self-view. Both Zoom and Google Meet let you hide your own video feed while others still see you. Others see you normally. You lose the self-monitoring loop. It sounds like a small thing, but it noticeably reduces the sustained attention pressure of long calls.
Build gaps between calls. Back-to-back video calls are the main driver of accumulated daily fatigue. Even five minutes between calls — away from screens, looking at distance — gives your visual system meaningful recovery time.
Use an external monitor for long calls. A larger screen at proper distance is significantly easier on the eyes than a laptop screen you're leaning toward. The extra resolution also means less visual effort to parse faces.
The blink rate problem during calls
Because blink rate drops more during video calls than during regular screen work, this is one of the highest-risk screen activities for eye surface dryness. Deliberately blinking fully whenever there's a natural pause — someone else is speaking, you're listening rather than presenting — can recover some of the tear film coverage that gets lost during active viewing.