The 2024 Summer Olympics are taking place in France this month—hosted in Paris, with events also happening in 16 other cities across France. The multi-sport event will span 16 days starting on July 26, 2024, ending on August 11, 2024, and with some regular events starting as early as July 24. Paris 2024, like all iterations of the Olympic Games, will be among the most watched entertainment events in the world, and it brings with it the significant risk of human factors like fatigue.
During the previous Summer Olympics in Tokyo, more than 3 billion viewers from around the world tuned in to follow the Summer Games. Even people who don’t usually watch sports will make time for the Olympics. For some, it might be the only opportunity to watch a favorite sport on TV, and it can feel truly patriotic to cheer on your country. Not to mention, it’s certainly a great topic of conversation around the water cooler at work.
However, the timing of some of the events may not suit everyone’s schedule. Paris operates on Central European Summer Time (CEST) and the events are set to their time zone. France is six hours ahead of North American Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), seven hours ahead of Central Daylight Time (CDT) and nine hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). This means many events set to take place in the Parisian morning will land in the dead of night for North Americans. If you’re trying to watch a specific event that your country is in, it could disrupt your normal sleep pattern.
Olympic fatigue
Olympic fatigue is definitely a thing—and not just for the athletes competing. While Olympians have coaches, teams and special strategies to help them manage the disorientation that comes with the travel and anxiety of their gold medal bids, the average viewer is on their own. Changing your regular sleep schedule to watch the Olympics can make you feel like you have jetlag—even though you’re watching from the comfort of your own home.
Global events pose global risks for workplaces and individuals, especially in time zones distant from the host location. And while you may be thinking you’ll just be tired, fatigue has further-reaching implications than causing you to yawn frequently. It has been fairly well reported that there is a rise in heart attacks and car accidents in the days following the spring daylight saving time change due to most people losing an hour of sleep. The Summer Olympics has the potential to extend this one-day, one-hour of sleep lost risk by 14 days, many hours and in many ways—a dangerous snowball effect in the heat of the summer (another risk factor for fatigue).
Reducing your regular amount of sleep will cause you to incur sleep debt, the cumulative effect of not getting enough shuteye. Since the Olympics only happens every four years, and only lasts 16 consecutive days, it can be easy to overlook the impact of changing your sleep schedule to watch the international competition. But it can have a massive effect on your mental health and fatigue levels.
The math behind Olympic sleep debt
Consider this: You woke up an hour earlier than usual on day four to watch the men’s synchronized diving final at 5 a.m. EDT and went to sleep at your regular time the night before. That one hour of sleep debt might not seem like such a big deal. On day five you were interested in the new 3×3 basketball event in the afternoon, which didn’t impact your sleep schedule, allowing you a full eight hours (but not the nine hours you needed to pay back your sleep debt). And day six had you waking up three hours earlier than you normally would to watch the rowing semifinals. Now you’ve incurred four hours of sleep debt over the span of three days. With Olympic events continuing for another ten days, it will be hard to pay back that sleep debt. In fact, if you’re like most people, you’ll incur even more as the Olympics progress.
If you’re really into the Olympics, the buzz, excitement and adrenaline may also affect your sleep. Even if you have every intention of going to bed early, your body might be alive with excitement over your country winning an event. Maybe you watched the victory on television, then went to social media to see what everyone else had to say about the win and now you can’t get to sleep—the exhilaration (and the blue light) could further increase your sleep debt.
Since many people will adjust their schedules a few hours here and there for the entire Olympic duration, the amount of sleep debt they incur will be alarmingly hazardous, not just to themselves but to those around them too. Fatigue doesn’t just make workers feel tired. According to research published in the Industrial Psychiatry Journal, “Fatigue usually refers to impairment in task performance. Also, fatigue has a psychological aspect that means not having enough energy to do work and experience subject reluctance to continue a task.” Fatigue decreases mental and physical performance and increases mistakes and lapses in judgment—thus causing more downtime and production errors, and increasing the risk of accidents and injuries.
To do a little more math, you are three times more likely to be in a car crash if you’re fatigued and distracted drivers are three times more likely to cause a fatal crash than focused drivers. And when you combine these things it isn’t addition (3+3=6), it’s multiplication (3×3=9). At work and on the road where your fatigue can impact multiple people, you could be operating at nine times the risk surrounded by an unknown number of people who are also potentially operating at nine times the risk.
Distractions abound
Despite this extreme amplification of risk, there has been little awareness about how the Olympics increases risks due to fatigue and distraction. Maybe it’s because everyone is distracted by the Olympics. When we’re fatigued, our brains don’t function as they should. Fatigue impacts our ability to concentrate and makes us more prone to distractions. A fully rested brain can maintain focus on the task at hand, but a fatigued brain can not. And with the excitement of a big event like the Olympics, there’s even more of a chance that distraction will consume your mind.
Picture this: You’re at work and everyone is talking about the Olympics. You walk past the TV in the breakroom, which is set to the news channel, and all you see are Olympic highlight reels showing athletes performing breathtaking feats. The bathroom that plays music from the local radio station is full of Olympic banter—speculating on medal counts and debating whether new events like breakdancing are technically sports. At lunch, you check your social media platforms only to find your feed is consumed by real-time Olympics commentary from the accounts you follow. With the Olympics so enmeshed with the fabric of everyday life, how could you not be distracted?
And distractions are not all tied to electronics. Our 6 Distraction Phenomena post defined cognitive distractions as “the internal distractions that cause you to think about anything other than what you’re supposed to be focused on. Mind-wandering, being lost in thought, daydreaming—these are all distractions of the mind.” These cognitive distractions take you further from the reduced alertness of fatigue and negatively impact productivity. When you are thinking about the Olympics, you are not thinking about the task at hand, and that puts you at risk of injury or worse.
In addition to distraction, this type of fatigue can make us more prone to other human factors.
Human factors brought on by fatigue
Understanding how exhaustion, sleep debt and shifting schedules can put us in other precarious states is the first step in making sure we manage our human factors to mitigate risk. Companies have even more multipliers. When people are tired and distracted there are not only risks to employees’ safety but also risks of degraded productivity, quality, or service.
Fatigue → Rushing
If you’ve incurred sleep debt due to waking up early to watch the Olympics, you may be more likely to sleep in or hit the snooze button one too many times on a workday. As a result, this may create scenarios where you have to rush to make it to work on time. Rushing during your morning commute is a recipe for danger. Make sure you take your time in the morning in order to stay safe as you leave home and hit the road. Rushing through your tasks at work is also a real possibility that can result in unfavorable outcomes.
Fatigue → Frustration
Many of us do not perform as we normally do when fatigue sets in, and that can lead to frustration. Anger is a reaction to something not going the way you had planned. If you’re normally quite productive in the workplace then the onset of a performance deficit can cause anger and frustration. And that’s not to mention how the Olympics can cause frustration of their own, whether it’s from witnessing a narrow defeat or missing a favorite event due to a scheduling conflict. Stay alert to the signs of fatigue-enhanced frustration and make a point to focus on your work.
Fatigue → Complacency
If you get in the habit of going to bed at the same time and getting up earlier than normal in order to watch the Olympics, you may end up normalizing the amount of risk you take on, affecting the ways you sleep, drive and perform dangerous tasks at work. That is, until it puts you in the line of fire—it often takes a near-miss or an injury for someone to realize they were being complacent. That’s why it’s so important to be conscious of the habits you develop.
Nothing ruins a good time like a safety incident. If you’re planning to watch the Olympics, prepare for it in the same way you would prepare for the Daylight Saving time change. Adjust your bedtime gradually before the Olympic events you plan to watch in the early morning, allowing enough sleep to account for the sleep debt you will incur. Avoiding stimulants like caffeine, as well as alcohol and blue light, for several hours before bedtime can be a great help too. Check out the Olympics schedule here to see when you’ll need more sleep so that you can plan accordingly to cheer on your country without endangering yourself or others (it has a handy “my time” converter so you won’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out the time change).
But there are other benefits if you manage these human factor events at a corporate level effectively and responsibly. You can win in three ways—manage the risks, increase productivity (which means less downtime) and improve your culture. First, talk about the human factors’ risks early and often. Adjust hours, work and expectations however possible to head off any anticipated risks. Encourage employees to look out for each other. Show you care. Generate excitement with team-themed activities around the Olympics so that employees don’t feel the need to lose sleep at home when they can get an update at work. If you identify and show enthusiasm for people’s interests outside of work it will help build commitment to remaining safe at work. Not only are you going to create a memorable Summer Olympics experience, but your workers’ enthusiasm will translate to good work performance and will help keep people safe.