ʕ•͡ω•ʔ Comfy Streaming ʕ•͡ω•ʔ

I've been learning a lot lately about how I have managed myself in social settings, and what affects me. Basically, I have an introverted personality. What I mean by that is I can't always spend my time in social situations; being out and not with anybody even makes me feel tired, and stressed at times. This DOES NOT mean that I dislike people. I really love being with my friends, and talking to people, and I do get lonely too despite becoming very exhausted at times being with others. I'm also diagnosed with clinical and situational depression, and struggle with anxiety on top of that.

This affects me when I'm streaming too, and it makes it harder for me to stream/speedrun for more than a few hours. Interacting with people, having my webcam on, feeling pressured to entertain, these things over time wear me down and make me feel tired even though I don't want to stop streaming/playing/speedrunning. However, I've been putting in a lot of thought on how to resolve this, and make it easier for me to stream, and have been thinking of strategies allow me to stream a lot longer too.



These are the strategies that I want to experiment with to help me stream:

1) Starting off without my chat open, and mic off:
The big reason I want to do this is to help me not feel pressured to entertain. As I said above, I love being social, but I become very anxious thinking about talking to people a lot and setting up my stream to make it where I can be more interactive. It's big hurdle to jump over in order just to START a stream. My idea is to start my stream with an hour, maybe longer, without needing to interact with the viewers. I know this may sound a little selfish, but it would help me a lot for a couple of different reasons as well.

2) I can do more practice on-stream!
In case you haven't noticed, I'm pretty pro at Master Quest ^.- That's because I have done a TON of practice, and spent a lot of hours outside of streaming, and doing RTA attempts grinding things out. There is a stigma amongst streaming that practice is very boring to watch. Not only that, but I feel that sometimes I can't focus as well if I need to be very attentive to my stream while I'm practicing. Without the pressure of talking to my stream until I'm ready it would help me to focus on practicing more, and would allow me to stream the gameplay that I'm already going to be doing.

3) I can do more non-speedrun streaming!
There is another stigma, and a very brutal schism between "Speedrunners" and "Lets-Players." Some people feel that Lets-Players don't deserve the kind of attention that they receive, or that Speedrunners are superior in the sense that the amount of effort that needs to be put in to perform and create less content. The reality is that I like to play games other than Master quest (shocking, I know). I have also wanted to stream some of the games that I play and the other challenges that I like to do. Also, since I would want my stream to begin more "quietly" for the first hour or so, this would help to fill that time as well. Playing games less competitively would also give me a chance to be less serious about what I'm doing, and just have a more fun and interactive stream in the future. When I'm speedrunning, I'm focused because I want to perform well, and play amazing, so I don't get always get to be as silly as I normally am IRL :p.
Also, this won't actually take away from any speedrun time. Just thought I'd put that in as reassurance in-case somebody is a die-hard speedrun watcher. I actually play all of these games regardless but have not felt comfortable enough to stream them.