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It's not just videos and streaming too. Anyone who creates content has these issues.

Even blogging has the same effect on you and it really sucks because everyone will say "you need a schedule because it's what people expect, they need to know when to tune back in".

But once you do this, your whole mentality changes from sporadically posting something interesting because you overcame some obstacle and wanted to share your newfound knowledge to "it's time to think about next week's post, and it must be done because your schedule dictates a new post in 2 days".

It's very stressful, even if you enjoy it.

When I was front man of a slightly successful band I felt the absolute worst and lonlyest after a gig.

It was such a low feeling I’ll never forget it and one of the things I miss least about it.

I think it came from 2 hours of trying to entertain a lot of people and make them feel good about life while simultaneously experiencing full on imposter syndrome.

With blogs, at least you can write some posts in advance, and use them to fill in the schedule if you're not creative/productive/healthy/whatever once. I've used this pretty successfully to maintain a 1post/week schedule for over a year.

No such option with live streaming.

Yeah, no doubt about it, streaming is way more demanding.

I usually prepare at least 3 posts in advance, but this has its flaws too because sometimes a certain topic is interesting "today", but it's not that interesting a month from now.

Also a lot of my posts come from experiencing something first hand and I find it to be a better writing experience if I write about what happened shortly after it happened, instead of weeks in the future when details might get stale.

Lastly, some posts take multiple days to write too, so it's not like you can just say to yourself "I'm going to crank out 4 top quality posts today and I'm set for the month".

I am in an artistic niche field that uses Instagram heavily. We are independent artists who tie our personal identity closely to our business identity, like musicians or graffiti artists.

While it's rewarding to gain followers and attention, it raises the pressure on me to post new images, and on what type of content and it's quality. At the end of a day that I don't update my Instagram I feel guilty. While I can gain followers and reputation by posting, I see myself lose followers by posting media that doesn't match my audience's expectations or by not posting often enough.

This has the effect of chilling the content creation that got my social media started in the first place. It makes me weigh the value of things I am doing in terms of whether I can exhibit them online. I especially shy back from posting personal content, but I don't really know what my audience prefers. Just art pics, or life and personality? To make things more complicated, there is social pressure as I know about 10% of the audience personally.

I have started other Instagram accounts where I post semi-anonymously to have the same sort of normal social media outlet as a regular person. If that were to grow in followers though, the same thing would happen.

Sounds similar to what I used to feel playing MMOs, and to a lesser extent online games at all. They caused me a lot of stress when they were supposed to be enjoyable. My work is stressful enough.

Now I only play single player games, and I’m much happier for it.

This is the reason I had to stop playing EVE Online. I love the premise and universe of the game, but my goodness does it start to feel like a "job" quickly.

I played some Eve, but yeah I felt the same feeling coming and had to quit. My original MMO was DAoC, which when I look back was a second job.

When I played some WoW it was care bear enough that I could mostly solo and not have any real obligations. Eve was very hard to solo much.

I feel this in relationships from time to time as well. We end up talking about it though, and figure out that the situation we ended up in was not a good one. We bring what we can, don't try to make the other person happy but rather try to make oneself happy and that in itself has a positive effect on the other partner.

I myself rather watch someone when they have something that they are eager to tell or show, rather than on a schedule. It feels like we all got that nerve as watchers, when we expect something to occur at a certain point in time with a certain quality we are effectively eating up the spontainious creativity.

My advice is to tell the audience that you need a break, you still want them to hang around. But you need to have faith in them being there, very much like any relationship. Or else it's up to you to satisfy the audience, when it's actually up to them to enjoy the stream.

Audience is a toxic that we should be vary with, not healthy to be in too much, but that's just my own opinion. It's nothing weird, just how it is.

> I don't know exactly why this type of activity can become stressful so quickly.

The weight of expectation, probably.

Try a web search for “emotional labor”.