Addicted to the Thrill: The Mental Game of TikTok Livestreaming
As someone with a heap of experience as a livestream sales presenter on TikTok Shop and having trained hundreds of others to do the same, one thing has become crystal clear to me: There’s a very real link between livestream sales and our mental and emotional well-being. When you’re live and the numbers roll up with every sale, your dopamine receptors light up. You feel high. Energised. Validated. On top of the world. When the sales stop? The crash can be brutal. You start questioning everything. Your energy dips. Your sense of worth gets shaky. What is this akin to? Gambling. And yet, I’ve never heard one person make that connection.
The Nervous System on Display
What we’re really looking at here is nervous system activation in real-time on a public stage. Livestream selling requires constant performance, charisma, presence, and responsiveness. It’s inherently dysregulating if we don’t know how to work with our nervous systems. Adrenaline kicks in as you go live. Dopamine floods when sales roll in. Cortisol spikes when they don’t. This loop keeps presenters in a constant state of hyperarousal or crash, which trauma-informed practitioners might recognise as cycles of fight, flight, or freeze. It’s not just about confidence. It’s about survival patterns playing out under pressure.
My Experience: When Numbers Start to Mean Everything
In my own experience as a livestreamer, I struggled deeply with the emotional highs and lows of fluctuating sales. I remember one live in particular when sales were flying, and I hit my all-time personal record for GMV. The energy was electric. I felt unstoppable. The next live? Crickets. And suddenly, I was spiralling. Wondering if I was good enough. If I’d lost my edge. If people even cared. That’s when I realised this wasn’t really about sales at all. It was about identity. It was about nervous system sensitivity. It was about how deeply we’ve been conditioned to tie our value to performance, outcomes, and external validation. At times, it completely distorted how I saw myself and impacted my ability to show up with clarity and grounded energy. Thankfully, I’ve always been committed to the inner work, and that gave me the tools to recognise what was happening in real time and recalibrate.
But What About Everyone Else?
What about the hundreds (thousands?) of other presenters out there who haven’t yet built that level of self-awareness? Who might be internalising those numbers as a measure of their worth, and spiralling without even realising why? This is why I now include this topic in all of my TikTok Shop presenter training packages, because if we don’t talk about the psychological and physiological impact of this kind of work, we risk burning people out fast and missing the bigger picture of what sustainable success actually looks like in this rapidly growing industry.
A New Way Forward: Embodied Sales & Emotional Awareness
This is about brain chemistry.
This is about emotional regulation.
This is about people, not just performance.
And most importantly, this is about bringing awareness to the unconscious patterns that drive how we show up, especially under pressure. Whether you’re a brand managing presenters or a creator building your own shop, it’s time to look deeper. Because the future of livestream sales won’t just be about conversion, it’ll be about coherence. Coherence between who you are, how you feel, and how you show up online.
Let’s start the conversation. Check out my TikTok Training packages here, and contact me for any more info or to set up a discovery call.