How to Stop Feeling Drained After Zoom Calls Through Astral Hygiene

A few years back, after the final team call on Zoom, I closed my laptop and just sat there in my chair, feeling drained and tired. My shoulders were so tired of carrying other people’s emotional burdens. It’s not like someone had yelled at me. There wasn’t any conflict. But during those 35 minutes in the meeting, I could feel that it sucked the life out of me. Yes, I was a little irritated, and I wanted to throw my phone across the room. And it wasn’t like being tired on a normal day. It was more subtle, on an energy level that I could feel.

The drained state that we often feel after a Zoom call is somewhat of a silent pandemic. Some meetings will make you really bored and will suck the life out of you. While in some other meetings, you’ll be completely engrossed and you won’t even realize when the meeting is over. So there’s a difference. Even in Zoom meetings. I was in denial for a very long time, thinking that it was just a normal office meeting. And it’s supposed to be stressful. And I’m supposed to get anxious, bored, or angry after a meeting. But, I was lying to myself. There was always a way out that I didn’t realize back then.

The floating heads on the screen

We were never created for this. When you’re watching that screen during a Zoom meeting, you’re constantly performing, judging, changing your face, or watching your face. And the whole thing feels a bit like a performance. You might not consciously realize it, but your body certainly does.

I consciously started to keep track of how I would feel after every single Zoom call. It wasn’t just tiredness. It was more of an emotional echo in my head afterwards. As if this tsunami of emotions had come without my permission.

Why Astral Hygiene Stopped Sounding Stupid

Back then, I wasn’t aware of the term astral hygiene. So, when I came across the term, it felt more like something that was impractical or stupid. However, I still kept an open mind to the concept behind it. I understood that people and situations taint your energy and that you need to cleanse it. And eventually, I trusted the process.

I learned the process. Then applied it in my own life. Say, for example, we all know that we should wash our hands after going to the subway or change our clothes after a hot day. Similarly, we also need to maintain astral hygiene while interacting with so many people during Zoom meetings so that we come out fresh with clean energy.

And this concept isn’t just applicable to video calls. Sometimes when you have a family dinner or you’re traveling in an airport with too many people, you get the same feeling. The energy residue that’s left behind from other people is invisible, but the exposure is real.

Most of us are energetically open by default. Particularly if we are empaths or the sensitive type. We don’t have any filter. We don’t have a doorknob on our internal doors. And then we ask ourselves, how could we allow that silly meeting to spoil the next six hours of our life?

What astral hygiene looks like

The concept of astral hygiene is pretty straightforward. Every interaction you have, whether it’s in a physical meeting or in a virtual meeting, leaves a trace. An energy trace. If it had been an in-person meeting, you could have just walked away and stretched a bit. And that actually helps you cleanse the energy. But when it’s online, because your attention is so locked into the faces and the voices for such a long period of time, your system absorbs a lot of the energy in the form of conversations.

You do not need to follow any strict rituals to cleanse that energy. It just requires your attention and awareness at some key moments. The moment when you start a meeting. The moment when you feel heavy during a call. And the moment right after you hang up from the call.

So just before the meeting begins, take around one to two minutes to sit still. Feel your feet on the floor. And picture yourself in an astronaut suit, shielding you from the outside energy. It’s nothing fancy. You’re just creating an astral barrier for yourself. So now, when you’re in a meeting, you’re not absorbing the energy of all the people in that meeting. You’re just there, protecting yourself. And your astral suit is protecting you. Some other people might imagine that it’s a suit formed with white light instead of an astronaut suit. Like, each to their own. You can come up with your own variation of that energy shield.

When the call goes a little bit longer, then check in with your body. If your shoulders are stiff. If your chest feels tight. If you’re lost in your own thoughts. In such a situation, the best thing to do is to mute yourself for a moment. Take some deep breaths. Some long exhales. Try to take in some fresh air. And that conscious breathing itself will do the work.

And after the call has ended, then the real work begins. Whenever you are done with a meeting, do not immediately open just another tab to do some research or to check your email. Immediately, the only thing you have to do is change your physical state. Stand up. Shake your arms. Take a bit of a walk. Do something physical. Maybe do 10 push-ups or 20 push-ups. Or go to the kitchen. Grab some fruits to eat. Maybe an apple. Maybe a banana. Do some stretches. Then come back. And then get back to work. So basically, you are breaking the pattern. So basically, you are taking a break, and your mind knows it. And when it knows that, then it relaxes on its own. And that’s a beautiful way of getting rid of digital residue.

Building a habit

One of the biggest mistakes that you could make to yourself is to treat these astral hygiene routines like a self-improvement task that needs to be perfect. If you do that, you might do it for a couple of days, then you’ll find the task itself to be a burden. So, it’s important that you do not make it into a task. You need to make it into a habit that you enjoy. It should be a practice that gives you a breath of fresh air.

Sometimes there can be situations where you might have subsequent meetings one after the other. And it’s okay to jump into the other meeting without taking a break. And you should not be hard on yourself if you do so. There’s no perfect way of doing things. All you have to do is be present enough so that your system knows that it’s expecting a cleansing.

Once you keep doing it for a couple of days, after a while, you don’t have to keep a strict counter. It’s just that simple decision that I’m no longer willing to carry the residue of another person that I have just met in that meeting. And that conscious awareness is more than enough to do the job for you.

One of the best things that you could do is take a bathroom break. Like, you don’t necessarily have to go to the bathroom to release yourself. But you can just go to the bathroom to wash your face and your hands after a video call. And in doing so, you’re out there, you’re walking, you’re standing up from your desk. You might do a stretch involuntarily. You might grab that water bottle, drink some water. And everything happens involuntarily without you trying to do anything. But those extra two minutes of your time to take a break make all the difference at the end of the day.

Those days when nothing seems to work

Let’s just agree that there will be some meetings that will be way heavier than the others. There will be conflicts. There will be some high-stakes decisions to make. There will be grief. There will be shouting, probably. Or some angry faces and stares. And those are the days when you feel that you need to jump out of that meeting immediately. And for those days, you need to go a little bit further.

Maybe you need a hot shower with a clear intention of washing off all that negative, toxic energy. And take some time for yourself. Use some scented candles. Take a short walk with no phones. Or just sit out there in silence in a dark room. Put on some guided meditation on your phone. And consciously and deliberately try to change your state of being, at least for that very moment.

You need to try to be in the present and not be in the past one hour. And in that present, you don’t have a Zoom meeting. In that present moment, you do not have any angry faces or people shouting or any high-stakes decisions to make. You can just have the time for yourself.

What changes when you keep doing this religiously?

After a few months, you’ll start noticing that the post-recovery from a Zoom meeting is just like another good habit that you’ve formed in your life. The energy drainage will stop looking like it was an old, distant memory.

Some calls will still leave a mark, but most of them won’t. The difference is that you’ll no longer walk away from your feelings. But instead, you’ll face them head-on. You’ll no longer be an emotional sponge. You’ll have an energy shield around you during those meetings. And that will be pretty automatic without you having to make any effort. It’ll be like a second habit for you.

The bigger shift is somewhat quieter. You’ll see and notice. You’ll start noticing the same patterns in in-person conversations as well. Like in a group chat or in a crowded place or in an airport or in a cafe. Once you learn to clear that energy residue from a video call, which is quite digital, you also get better at noticing when an in-person interaction has left some energy residue behind. And once you notice that, it’s very easy to get rid of it.

The choice is the real point when it comes to astral hygiene. It’s not the purity. It’s not the spiritual superiority of you over your other office colleagues. Nothing like that. It’s just that basic right to leave an interaction without carrying pieces of energy residue from another person.