Listening to Digital Fatigue: What Neurodivergent Students Are Telling Us About Online Learning

By Giselle Tadman

Since the pandemic, online learning has transitioned from an emergency measure to a permanent aspect of higher education. Although lecture halls are open again, the digital classroom remains. We continue to log into platforms daily, managing screens, tabs, discussion boards, and video calls, often without considering how this routine affects us physically. For many students, particularly those who are neurodivergent, this new normal comes with an unseen cost, a profound, lingering exhaustion beyond mere tiredness. It is digital fatigue.

My recent research delved into how neurodivergent students experience fatigue in post-pandemic online learning settings. Their narratives revealed that fatigue is not merely a result of overwork or screen exposure. It is cyclical, relational, and embodied, a continuous negotiation involving energy, attention, environment, and expectations. It signals both from the system and the self.

When I started this study, I aimed to understand digital fatigue from an internal perspective. The neurodivergent students, all engaged in fully online studies, shared insightful and emotional stories that extended beyond traditional ideas of workload or burnout. They described fatigue accumulating gradually, like a fog after weeks of intense focus. One participant likened it to “pushing through fog,” a mental and physical heaviness that blurred focus and slowed thought. Another noted the eerie silence of online learning, filled not with rest but isolation, where the lack of casual human contact heightened the sense of working alone. Others found solace in technology, using dictation software, blue-light filters, and time-management apps to find moments of control in the endless digital flow. Yet, even these tools had their limits. Relief often came only through withdrawal, rest, or humor, small acts of resistance in a system that rarely pauses.

What struck me most was that fatigue wasn’t a single episode of burnout but a rhythm of strain and recovery mirroring the academic calendar. Fatigue peaked during assessments, eased after submissions, and returned with new deadlines. It had its own seasons and tides. Students learned to anticipate these cycles, adjusting their study patterns and self-care routines in deeply personal and quietly heroic ways. The language they used, “I just have to push through,” “I plan my days around my energy,” “I know when I’ll crash,” revealed both agency and exhaustion. Their strategies were intelligent and adaptive, highlighting how much responsibility for survival had shifted onto the individual.

Viewing these accounts through a relational lens clarified that fatigue is not simply a personal failure of stamina or discipline. It results from the environments we design and the cultural expectations we uphold. Online learning spaces often promise flexibility and productivity, study anytime, anywhere, but this promise can obscure a more demanding reality. When learning becomes boundless, it also becomes endless. The digital university rarely sleeps, nor do the notifications, reminders, or discussion threads that define it. For neurodivergent students, whose sensory and cognitive processing can be more finely attuned, this constant stimulation can be particularly draining. Long text blocks, dense interfaces, or unclear instructions create layers of cognitive friction that quickly lead to exhaustion.

Yet, the students in this study also reminded me that fatigue is not just depletion; it is communication. It indicates a misalignment between institutional pacing and human rhythm, between design and embodiment, between the idea of education as efficiency and the reality of education as relationship. In this way, fatigue becomes feedback: a message from the learner’s body to the systems shaping their learning.

What alleviated fatigue in these narratives was rarely a new tool or technological solution. It was care. Sometimes this came through a small gesture, like a tutor checking in personally rather than sending a templated response. Sometimes it was the course structure allowing students to access materials early or take breaks without penalty. For one participant, humor became a survival strategy, a way to reclaim agency in moments of depletion. For another, a simple phone call from a mentor made the difference between persistence and withdrawal. These are relational practices, not digital innovations, yet they had more impact on fatigue than any device or platform.

There is something profoundly human about how these students described their learning. They spoke in rhythms, pauses, laughter, and sighs. Fatigue lived not just in their words but in the tempo of their speech, the slowing, the looping, the gaps. It made me consider how we rarely listen to fatigue as an embodied voice. We tend to measure it, manage it, or ignore it, but what if we treated it as a teacher? What if digital fatigue is telling us how to build more sustainable learning environments, ones that recognize attention as a limited resource and rest as a legitimate part of study?

Online learning has undeniable benefits, especially for neurodivergent students who value flexibility and the ability to learn in sensory-safe environments. Many participants expressed gratitude for studying from home, at their own pace, without the social pressures of traditional classrooms. Yet, flexibility alone is not inclusion. When flexibility means “you are on your own,” it can turn freedom into isolation. Real inclusivity requires learning designs that build community, honor difference, and accommodate fluctuations in focus, energy, and humanity.

The post-pandemic university faces a pivotal question. Having normalized digital learning, can it now humanize it? Can we design online education that listens as much as it speaks, seeing fatigue not as a weakness but as a guide toward better practice?

The answer begins with attention, not the kind we demand from students, but the kind we offer to them. Attention to rhythm, language, pacing. Attention to how technology mediates not only knowledge but also emotion and embodiment. Attention to the social architectures of learning: who feels seen, who feels heard, who feels alone.

If we listen closely, digital fatigue is already telling us what needs to change. It asks for smaller doses of content, gentler pacing, more relational presence, and a culture that values sustainability over speed. It reminds us that behind every glowing screen is a living body with limits, rhythms, and needs.

Fatigue, in this sense, is not failure. It is feedback. It is the body’s quiet message to slow down, redesign, and restore balance between productivity and presence. For educators and designers, listening to this message might be the most important pedagogical act of all.

Digital learning is here to stay, but it does not have to exhaust us. By listening, truly listening, to the stories of neurodivergent students, we can begin to imagine online education that honours difference, values rest, and rebuilds belonging. Perhaps then, the digital university will not only function efficiently but also feel humane.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash