When the Screen Feels Too Loud: Rethinking Zoom for Integration
When the Screen Feels Too Loud: Rethinking Zoom for Integration
A Note on Audience
While this article is written primarily for fellow practitioners—those holding space, teaching, facilitating—I hope clients and seekers feel welcomed, too.
This model of slow tech and embodied integration belongs to all of us.
If you're a client, you’re invited to explore this rhythm gently or tell me if you think its bullshit. Or if I am tapping into truth or just tapping into the need of a necessary sabbatical! This is why we are community, and I deeply value your reflections as sacred mirrors to my process.
Finally, I have taken the next 10 days to be at an in person retreat and I am hoping a bit of nature immersion may hold me as my system recalibrates. (hopefully to not forget, but to release some of the charge)
I suppose I could be the poster child for someone who once celebrated the freedom of screen-based work. I loved being able to travel the world while supporting clients from every corner of it. Oh what a blessing and delight to work with women from Saudi, men from the USA and folks from all over.
For years, it felt expansive and empowering.
But what recently came to pass has come as big surprise. I’ve spent nearly a decade facilitating healing work virtually, while also holding in-person plant medicine retreats. And after such a long series of seasons in support, it seems like a dissolution is setting in….I didn’t expect this. I’ve built an entire therapeutic practice on Zoom. I’ve seen people through their darkest nights, their awakenings, their dissolutions—face to glowing face.
After a particularly deep journey of my own—the kind that expands beyond meaning-making in a self-referential way, the kind that ripples through the soma and into the psyche with neurobiological and psychospiritual velocity—I found myself unusually sensitive to screens.
Video calls became overstimulating. The constant self-monitoring, the split attention between another’s image and my own, the glowing rectangle that replaces true presence—it all felt unbearable.Is it Zoom fatigue? Burnout? Or something deeper—perhaps a kind of dissonance between nervous system coherence and the artificiality of digital presence?
I want to explore this shift not because I have the answer, but because it’s my highest intention to be of true service—to myself and to others. Real healing happens when both people benefit, when presence is mutual. What happens when my presence is severely interrupted due to video sensitivity. I don’t pretend to have answers here. I’m just noticing—curious, tender, a bit exhausted—and wondering if others are feeling this too.
This article is not a declaration of knowing what’s right. It’s an exploration, an offering, and a request for feedback. It’s a questioning of the assumption that connection equals visibility.
Why I'm Questioning Zoom (Again)
This isn’t the first time I’ve questioned Zoom, but this is the first time it’s felt like a full-body no. For a long time, I could override the strain because the work was meaningful. I told myself: it's just a screen. I can co-regulate through pixels. I can sense their breath, their tremble, their ache—even if it's a little blurry.
But something has changed. Maybe it's the cumulative toll of hundreds of screen hours. Maybe it's the way certain psychedelic journeys make my nervous system more porous. Maybe it's that I’ve crossed a threshold in my own healing. Whatever it is, my body is telling me: enough.
Zoom and the Nervous System
Screens weren’t made for soul work. Zoom, in particular, puts us in a strange neurobiological limbo: eye contact without presence, visibility without touch, connection without scent, micro-expressions flattened into 2D.
In polyvagal terms, this is disorienting. Our nervous systems rely on full-spectrum cues for safety—tone of voice, posture, scent, pacing. On Zoom, we get some—but not all. The result? For some of us, chronic low-level dysregulation.
After psychedelic journeys, the nervous system is already wide open. Our senses are heightened, our boundaries more fluid. Adding artificial light, latency, and constant frontal gaze can feel abrasive.
Some clients report not being able to sleep after Zoom sessions. Others get headaches. Many say they feel more present and calm when we switch to audio.
The Myth of Visual Equals Connection
We’ve been trained to believe that visual presence equals emotional presence. But in somatic and psychedelic spaces, that isn’t always true.
Sometimes it’s a relief to not be seen—to close the eyes, to walk barefoot, to feel the Earth beneath your feet while talking about grief. Some of my most attuned sessions have happened while both of us were lying on the floor, speaking by voice alone.
Visual input isn’t inherently better. In fact, it can sometimes create performance anxiety. Clients may feel pressure to appear calm, organized, or grateful—especially after a big journey. Without the camera, something softens. Truth can emerge.
Blue Light Sensitivity in Post-Medicine States
After psychedelic work—particularly with medicines like 5-MeO-DMT, ayahuasca, psilocybin, or ketamine—many people report an increased sensitivity to light, especially blue light emitted from screens. This sensitivity is not just visual—it’s hormonal, neurological, and rhythmic.
Psychedelics often shift people into deeper ultradian and circadian awareness—natural internal rhythms that regulate everything from sleep cycles to emotional regulation. For many, these medicines help them downshift from a dopamine-dominant lifestyle—driven by urgency, productivity, and goal-seeking—into a slower neurochemical rhythm governed by serotonin, oxytocin, and vasopressin.
As described in The Molecule of More, dopamine fuels the forward motion of ambition and novelty, but serotonin and oxytocin anchor us in contentment, connection, and presence. Psychedelic integration is often a movement from doing into being. In fact, the very chemical composition of psychedelics triggers the 5HT2A receptor, a serotonin receptor responsible for meaning-making. It also happens to exist in an inverse relationship to dopamine.
But blue light is fundamentally stimulating.
Blue light—especially from screens—suppresses melatonin production, disrupts circadian signaling, and increases alertness. This may be useful in an office environment, but for someone freshly reorganizing their nervous system, it can be jarring, even dysregulating.
Studies show that blue light exposure:
Increases cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone
Suppresses melatonin, which interferes with deep rest and emotional regulation
Delays REM sleep, which is essential for dream integration and memory consolidation
Activates sympathetic arousal, making it harder to downshift into parasympathetic states
For clients in post-medicine states, this means:
Trouble sleeping or resting after a Zoom session
Irritability or overstimulation
Feeling “pushed” back into the dopamine-driven world they were trying to leave behind
A subtle shift back into performance-based integration—where healing is measured by output, practices completed, or time spent meditating, rather than felt attunement and embodied trust
If we’re guiding people toward nervous system balance, why would we place them in front of a light source that mimics noon-day sun and signals the body to stay alert?
Or, if we are therapists ourselves trying to balance self healing, surprises on the path to plant allyship how do we navigate and negotiate this work?
References:
Cajochen, C., et al. (2005). High sensitivity of human melatonin, alertness, thermoregulation, and heart rate to short wavelength light. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 90(3), 1311–1316.
"Blue light has a dark side." Harvard Medical School, 2012.
Chang, A.-M., et al. (2015). Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness. PNAS, 112(4), 1232–1237.