Zzzz....

Did you get enough sleep last night? If you work in live event production, the chances are you did not. Between our busy production schedules and the culture of "the show must go on," too often we are an industry of sleep-deprived individuals doing the best we can to make it to the next day off and hoping to catch up on our much-needed beauty rest.

It's a problem that was a major topic of discussion at the Event Safety Alliance's Safety Summit, which was recently held at Rock Lititz. The problem is that chronic sleep deprivation can lead to serious health problems, reduced cognition, temper tantrums, and, as a result, increased risk of accidents. There's a great Ted Talks video by Claudia Aguirre called "What would happen if you didn't sleep?"

Interestingly enough, in another Ted Talk by Jessica Gamble called "Our natural sleep cycle is nothing like what we do now," she talks about what has been learned from sleep studies. It turns out that when people are allowed to listen to their own body clocks and live without natural light (which allows them to sleep without even knowing what time it is), they tend to sleep from 8PM to midnight, wake for a couple of hours, and then sleep again from about 2AM to sunrise. Does that cycle sound familiar? If you've ever done a concert tour, you might have been lucky enough to catch some shut-eye during the show, typically 8PM to around midnight, load out, then go back to sleep again from 2AM until breakfast. Lucky you.

For the rest of us, it's time we seek solutions to this pervasive problem. There are no easy answers, but solving hard problems is what the live event production industry specializes in.

Event Safety Summit 2018 - Sleep deprivation and its consequences was a major topic of discussion.