Friday afternoon mental drain/overload

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I work on my campus TV station as a technical director for our live friday afternoon newcast.

A technical director is the person who puts video sources on the air, and keys graphics, handles special effects, and a few other things.

Doing the news program is a highly demanding job. Running the video board, I have to be listening to two different people at the same time, watching several monitors in front of me, as well as keeping an eye on my hands to make sure I hit the right buttons, plus looking out for any mistakes the director might make so something dosen't get on the air when it shouldn't.

It's a fun, yet horribly draining way to spend 30 minutes. Last friday when the show got over I felt like I had been up for 48 hours. The overload was intense and I was flapping hands the whole time after I left. I wanted nothing more to do than go back to my dorm and lay down for a few hours and block out the world around me to recover.

But I couldn't do that, I had to drive back home to work at my weekend job, and my drive to and from oshkosh is no fun either.

Why do I beat myself up like this?

I think that the reason you beat yourself up like this is because it's partially an AS trait, and a little bit of personality. I've read that people with AS could be extreme perfectionists and extremely hard working people; some of us are obsessive about work. I'm like that, since whenever I do something I like to try my best, I like it to be almost perfect, and if I don't I'm down on and all over myself. I'm also scared of appearing stupid, which is another AS trait that we take very very seriously. The case for you is that maybe you're trying to make everything so perfect that you take your mind off of everything else except your work for the full 30 minutes, and you're work is going on so constantly for that chunk of time that it's making you feel literally flustered. I hope this helps Scoots; sorry if it's not what you're talking about.

That's a good way of describing it.

When I sit down up there to work I want everything to go to perfection and I stive for it in the worst possible way.

If I make a mistake I find my self cringing over it. Then I start to put myself down and I feel like crap for it becasue in my mind, I've let down the other people on the team.

To complicate things even more, I'm very literal in how I take directions. If a director refers to something as one thing one time and the same thing as something else the next time, it can quite literally cause me freeze up as I try to interprut this new and forigen instruction.

But the worst part is the overload that drains all my energy.