The Weight We Carry: What Event Professionals Told Us About Burnout, Connection, and What Comes Next
By Tracy Judge, Founder & CEO, Soundings
Every event professional I know loves this industry. I have never once had someone tell me they got into events because it was easy, or because they were looking for a predictable schedule. People stay because the work matters and because the moment it comes together is genuinely thrilling.
That is exactly why we built The Weight We Carry: A Wellbeing Conversation for Event Professionals, a webinar and community survey we hosted in partnership with Wist, a daily stress management platform built on cognitive behavioral therapy and positive psychology. Anil Punyapu, Wist's founder and a longtime Cvent veteran, and Dr. Tasha Golden, a behavioral scientist who has spent her career studying creativity and wellbeing, joined me for an honest conversation about what stress and sustainability actually look like in this industry. Not theory. Something practical.
The Soundings Wellbeing Check-In launched the same day as the webinar. Thirty-one event professionals responded, most of them freelance, fractional, or consulting talent carrying a median of five roles each. Nearly half had supported eleven or more events in the past year. What came back was not a story about people who hate their jobs. It was a story about strain that has become so normalized nobody is naming it out loud.
Let’s dig into the findings together.
Commitment Is Masking the Cost
Forty-two percent of respondents described themselves as energized, determined, or inspired by their work right now. I believe them. But fifty-five percent also reported recent physical or emotional exhaustion, and only six percent were willing to call themselves burned out.
That gap is the finding. Strain has not gone away. It has just stopped registering as strain.
Sustainability, Not Burnout, Is the Signal to Watch
If you wait for someone to say the word "burnout," you will wait too long. Twenty-nine percent rated their own pace as unsustainable, and forty-five percent had already considered leaving the industry or changing how they work. Among respondents who described themselves as anxious about the future, six out of seven had considered walking away.
Intent to reduce or leave turned out to be a far more honest signal than any burnout checklist.
Nobody Asked for More Content
When we asked what would actually help, the answer was not a newsletter. It was not another wellbeing email. Seventy-four percent said they would use networking opportunities through Soundings, and fifty-two percent wanted peer discussion groups specifically.
People are not short on information about how to manage stress. They are short on other people who understand what the work actually requires.
One Person, Five Roles, No Clean Line
The typical respondent in this group is not doing one job. They are doing five, often at once: planning, logistics, staffing, onsite leadership, project management. Sixty-eight percent carry four or more roles, and seventy-one percent are handling both logistics and onsite leadership themselves.
That versatility is a genuine strength. It becomes a risk only when it is paired with unclear expectations or not enough staffing to back it up.
The Pressure Doesn't Wait for Show Day
I think there is a persistent myth that event stress peaks onsite. It does not. Thirty-five percent named getting selected or waiting for the next assignment as their heaviest phase, and another thirty-five percent named scoping and pre-event delivery. Only three percent pointed to onsite execution itself.
One respondent put it plainly: "We can't finish it tomorrow. Each delayed or missed item on the timeline causes a domino effect. So much responsibility."
Volume Doesn't Just Cause Fatigue. It Can Erode Trust in the Work
This was the finding that surprised me most. Professionals who supported eleven or more events in the past year were not simply more tired. They were far more likely to describe themselves as cynical or detached (67% versus 13% for lower-volume professionals), to call their pace unsustainable (47% versus 13%), and to have considered leaving (60% versus 31%).
Fatigue passes. Cynicism is a different kind of warning. It suggests people are starting to lose trust in the environment around the work, not just their energy for it.
The Show Ends. The Replay Doesn't.
Sixty-eight percent of respondents replay work problems often or almost always, well after the event has closed. Thirty-five percent have real trouble letting go of work stress, and thirty-two percent reported trouble sleeping because of it.
"It is not easy to turn it off or shut it down at the end of the day," one respondent told us. I don't think that's an exaggeration. Recovery isn't a nice-to-have here. It's part of doing the job sustainably.
People Already Know How to Reset. It Isn't Enough on Its Own.
Fifty-eight percent take short reset breaks daily, and seventy-one percent step outside to clear their heads. But in our sample, people who reset daily were no more likely to call their pace sustainable than people who didn't. That doesn't mean resets don't work. It means individual coping can't substitute for better work design around them.
Connection Was the Strongest Protective Factor We Found
Here is the number that shaped everything we decided to do next: among respondents who felt disconnected from a professional community, seventy percent called their pace unsustainable. Among those who felt connected, that number dropped to eleven percent.
Thirty-two percent currently feel somewhat or very disconnected. One person asked us directly: "Could we actually know who else is part of the community?"
That question is the whole opportunity in one sentence.
Where We Go From Here
Freelancers do not just need more resources. They need each other. That is the finding underneath every other finding in this survey, and it's what we're building Soundings around: helping independent professionals know one another, show up for one another, grow together, and get wellbeing support that's timely and social rather than generic.
Seventy-five percent of respondents were open to trying a daily self-care tool built for how they actually work; only thirteen percent wanted another wellbeing email. That is exactly the gap Wist is built to close, and part of why this partnership made sense from the start. Ten minutes a day, grounded in real behavioral science, adapting to the person using it rather than broadcasting the same advice to everyone.
None of that replaces fair rates, clear scoping, or better staffing. It's not meant to. But for a workforce this committed and this stretched, connection may be the one lever that's been sitting right in front of us.
If any of this sounds like your own year, I'd love to hear it. Drop a comment, tell me what resonated, or reach out directly. We're building this with the community, not for it. And if you want to see the full conversation, the webinar recording is linked at soundingsconnect.com/wist.