We all know the scene – a folded back duvet, a tray of coffee and the Sunday papers, with a happy couple wrapped up in silky pyjamas. The ‘ Easy Like Sunday Morning ’ theme was a selling point for mattress companies and home ware stores everywhere in the 90s. Yet whilst the scene may have helped persuade our mattress choice, it might not have had as much impact on our lifestyle as it does today.
Recent research carried out by Hook Research has told us that Sunday is still as special as ever. Sunday has arguably become the most popular and sellable day of the week. People enjoy investing in their Sunday if it improves comfort, provides a quality experience or enhances their time with family or friends.
Easy Like Sunday Morning
With the rise of social media, food and lifestyle photography has become so popular that’s it’s begun to influence the lifestyle choices of the general public.
Scroll through Instagram on a Sunday and you’ll see memes about pillows and ‘Sunday Morning Feels’, countless beautiful images featuring mugs of coffee, thick books, bare legs dressed in woolly socks and bedding in dusty greys and whites. You’ll also find the highly photogenic avocado on toast, next to an artistic flat white on a distressed antique table. This isn’t a dig at the Sunday instagrammers – quite the contrary, the pictures are alluring and inspiring. They hint to a lifestyle that I, and it seems, countless others, want to indulge in.
These images remove the guilt that’s associated with taking time out and slowly down, encouraging us to feel good about relaxing – a rare luxury in the working week.
Chilled out Sunday
Sunday afternoons are filled with pub lunches, country walks and movies. Spotify lulls us into a post roast dinner coma with their endless ‘Chilled Out Sunday’ playlists, captured with images of hazy afternoons reclining in over-sized arms chairs. Perhaps it’s to do with the pace of the weekdays, the lack of real life interactions we are experiencing or maybe it’s simply just how photogenic it all is, but a cosy autumnal Sunday with loved ones is so desirable that books on Hygge – the art of cosiness, well-being and happiness – are now replacing the ‘Clean Eating’ cookbook trend.
The ‘ Easy Like Sunday Morning ‘ feeling is no longer something we want to preserve for weekends alone, we want to get home and recreate it after work with a house full of candles, soft throws and scatter cushions. Instead of crashing in front of the TV with a takeaway on our laps, we now want a higher quality experience.
It’s about creating an environment where some of our most basic needs are not just met, but indulged. It’s about taking warmth, rest and security and turning it into comfort, transforming food and water into treasured experiences and enhancing our feelings of belongingness by creating an environment where we can be intimate and close with others.
Sharing moments – Sunday night TV
It’s no surprise, then, that as the nights draw in and the evenings become chilly, Sunday night linear TV is doing well.
Last week Strictly pulled in 10.3m viewers, Planet Earth II 9.3m and I’m a Celebrity 9.2m (with the previous week drawing in 11 million viewers). During our recent research into Sunday night TV, viewers told us that ‘Sundays are sacred’, with children and adults emphasising the importance of ‘sharing moments’ with their family, often through films and traditional family TV viewing. ITV’s hugely successful Victoria is the epitome of great Sunday night TV; traditional romance, accessible history and high quality drama that captivates audiences and pulls in over 5m viewers a show.
Sunday has historically been the day when the working world takes a break. Though times have changed and we can now pop down to Tesco’s without too much trouble, it’s clear that we still cherish the tradition of downtime with loved ones. These rising trends, whether they’re books, social media images or Spotify playlist are attractive not just because they look good, but because they help us meet our most human needs whilst creating feelings of well-being, happiness and appreciation.
So do we now expect everyday to be easy like Sunday morning? Perhaps Hygge isn’t just about the art of cosiness, perhaps it has also tapped into what we love most about Sundays and which we want to see expressed throughout the week – the art of human moments.
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