The Meeting Setting Quietly Wrecking Your ADHD Brain

You've probably blamed the meeting. Too long, too many people, too early in the morning. But there's a decent chance the actual damage is coming from something nobody thinks to question: the little grid of faces staring back at you.

A 2026 study in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction (Kelly, Kim, Winchester, Choi & Foresman) looked at 522 working professionals and compared how two common video call layouts affected them — gallery mode, where everyone's face fills its own tile, versus presenter or speaker mode, where the screen holds on one person at a time. Employees with ADHD showed significantly more burnout in gallery mode. Not from the meeting's length. Not from its topic. From the layout.

The researchers call it "extraneous cognitive load" — mental effort spent on stuff that has nothing to do with the actual content. Gallery view asks your brain to keep tabs on a dozen faces at once: who's nodding, who looks bored, who just muted themselves mid-sentence. Presenter mode asks it to track one thing. For a brain that already spends more energy filtering what matters from what doesn't, that difference isn't small. It's the whole meeting.

Here's the part that'll mess with your assumptions, though: the same study found in-person meetings were more draining for ADHD participants than virtual ones. Not because rooms are worse than screens — because a physical room gives you zero control. You can't mute yourself, glance away for three seconds, or fidget with something out of frame without someone noticing. A screen, weirdly, hands some of that control back. The problem was never "video calls are the enemy." It's how much say you get over what you're forced to look at.

The self-view tax you've been paying since 2020

This isn't just an ADHD-specific finding stapled onto older research — it slots directly into work Stanford's Jeremy Bailenson has been doing since the start of the remote-work boom. His lab identified four drivers of what everyone started calling "Zoom fatigue," and one of them is staring at your own face for hours a day. He compares it to a mirror: a mirror you're not supposed to check every ninety seconds, in a meeting, while also trying to think. Earlier work by George and Stopa (2008) found that turning on self-view during a call made people more anxious about how they were coming across — not imagined anxiety, measured anxiety.

Put those two findings together and you get a fuller picture. Gallery view taxes your attention by making you track everyone. Self-view taxes it further by making you monitor yourself, too, on a loop, the entire time you're supposed to be listening. For a brain wired to overspend on exactly this kind of split attention, that's two separate costs stacking on top of a meeting that already wanted more from you than it should.

Why this belongs in the "managing up" pile, not the disclosure pile

Here's the useful part. You don't need a conversation about your diagnosis to fix this. You don't need to loop in HR, cite a study to your manager, or frame it as an accommodation request at all. You just need to change a setting — one that Stanford has been telling everyone, ADHD or not, to change for five years.

In most tools, you can pin whoever's talking so your screen holds one face instead of a grid, and you can hide your own self-view with a couple of clicks. Zoom and Teams both bury it under a right-click on your own tile; Meet has a "hide self-view" toggle in the layout settings. None of it requires an explanation. If someone asks why your screen looks different, "the grid was distracting me" is a complete sentence. You don't owe anyone your full reasoning to adjust your own workspace.

If you run meetings yourself, the ask scales up naturally: default to speaker view instead of gallery for anything over three or four people, especially for calls that are mostly one person presenting. That's not an ADHD accommodation, either — it's just better meeting design, and it happens to help you the most.

The one thing to actually try

Before your next video call, do two things: pin the speaker instead of leaving it on gallery, and hide your own self-view. That's it. It costs nothing, requires no permission, and directly targets the two mechanisms the research points to — the multi-face tracking and the mirror. You'll probably still be tired after a long meeting day. Meetings are still meetings. But you'll have quietly removed two taxes your brain was paying that had nothing to do with the actual work.

It's a small thing to test, which is exactly why it's worth testing. You don't have to restructure your job or have a hard conversation to find out if it helps — you just have to click twice before your 10 a.m. call.

This post is general information, not medical advice. If something here is useful, try it — but decisions about your own health and care belong with a qualified professional.

References

• Kelly, S., Kim, J., Winchester, D., Choi, J. H., & Foresman, G. (2026). International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 42(5), 3471–3483. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2025.2531292
• Stanford News (2021). "Four causes for 'Zoom fatigue' and their solutions," summarizing research from Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2021/02/four-causes-zoom-fatigue-solutions