Make Sunday boring again: How an end-of-week shutdown could save us all
Not to sound hopelessly nostalgic, but Sundays used to be better, didn’t they? Maybe my vision is distorted by buffed-up, rose-tinted specs – I vaguely recall being woefully bored at the time – but in hindsight, the Sundays of my youth resemble a blissful, stress-free utopia. Once a week, my family would go to church; take a bracing yomp in green, open space; eat a roast dinner; and spend the afternoon reading or playing games before pivoting to an evening watching some of the most gentle programmes in the history of TV scheduling (Songs of Praise segueing seamlessly into Antiques Roadshow and Last of the Summer Wine). It was a day of peace, a day of rest, a day of, whether intentionally or not, Sabbath.
Part of this weekly slowdown was enshrined in law. Up until the mid-1990s, buying and selling on Sunday was still illegal under the Shops Act 1950. Almost nothing was open; to all intents and purposes, consumerism ground to a halt. “For better or worse, Sunday was different and had an identity of its own,” says Daniel Gray, author of Sunday Best, a new book exploring the UK’s Sunday traditions.
This lingering limitation on opening hours was a hangover from Britain’s history as a Christian country, part of a wider religious tradition stipulating that, since God happily knocked off on the seventh day after making all of creation, perhaps we mere mortals should follow His lead. It was inspired by the Sabbath, a Jewish custom that’s still observed by practicing Jews today. From sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, abstaining from work is the order of the day – although what constitutes “work” can be a source of contention, depending on your interpretation – alongside devoting time to worshipping God.
Never ones to shy away from borrowing a good idea, Christians adopted the concept and shunted it to Sundays, with the fluid principles behind “Sabbath” evolving over the centuries – as evidenced by the changing legislation about what one could and couldn’t legally do on this sacred day. Gray highlights these rules through history in Sunday Best: as early as the year 925, the first King of England, Athelstan, outlawed Sunday trading; subsequent monarchs prohibited everything from sports and music to travel and “assembling” (other than at church, of course).
Even as religious adherence waned and Sabbath observance plummeted in Christian societies after the Second World War, the setting aside of a special day once a week – 24 hours of rest, simplicity and quality time with family – continued to permeate and shape British culture.
But has the day now “lost its sense of otherness”, as Gray puts it, as a consequence of growing secularism and the fact that legislation governing Sundays has largely fallen by the wayside?
The answer seems to be a resounding “yes”. Sunday’s uniquely lazy flavour arguably started to get diluted with the Sunday Trading Act 1994, still in place today, which stipulates that stores can fling wide their doors on a Sunday – albeit for a maximum of six hours between the hours of 10am and 6pm. “The fact that everything’s open makes it look like the other days of the week,” says Gray. “It also doesn’t feel like it used to because of the incursion of the coming week. Monday seems to have made its way into Sunday through technology – checking our work emails on our phones, for example.”
What has fundamentally changed, he posits, is that we’ve collectively forgotten the beautiful art of being quiet – previously a key tenet of what differentiated Sunday from the surrounding week’s hecticness. “Everything’s so noisy and in your face,” says Gray. “There’s so much noise from people’s phones.”
The peaceful, switched-off Sunday may have been eroded over time, yet we are in need of rest more than ever, argues Claudia Hammond, author of The Art of Rest. “The benefits of getting more rest cannot be overstated,” she says. “And the same is true of the downsides of not resting enough; half of sick days taken are due to work-related stress. Our over-busy lives can leave us fatigued, which in turn can lead to memory lapses, blunted emotions, poor concentration, misunderstandings, poor judgement, and even accidents.”
By contrast, taking proper breaks and having a decent amount of rest can lower blood pressure and heart rate, boost concentration and creativity levels and increase resilience against stress. Hammond cites the Rest Test, conducted by psychologists from Durham University, which found that people who think they get more rest than average have wellbeing scores twice as high as those who feel in need of more rest.
But true rest in the digital era is very hard to come by. The online world is constantly encroaching; physical shops may be limited to certain opening hours on Sundays, but ecommerce never sleeps. News alerts, notifications, messages – none of it takes a day off.
For better or worse, Sunday was different and had an identity of its own
Daniel Gray
Part of the nostalgia of looking back is remembering the kind of Sunday, now hard to fathom, during which no one scrolled on their phone, replied to an email on their iPad, responded to the “ping-ping-ping!” of constant incoming WhatsApps or mindlessly let another episode of Married At First Sight flick onto the flatscreen telly while barely concentrating.
Many of us view these 21st-century screen-related activities as being part of our leisure or relaxation time – 24 per cent of us consider scrolling on social media a “hobby”, according to one 2024 poll – yet research shows that they are anything but restful. Study after study has linked increased social media use to anxiety and depression. Experts have associated the growth in smartphone use with a mental health crisis in children and young people around the globe.
Society as a whole, meanwhile, is in the midst of a mass cognitive decline – or “brainrot”, to use the horrifying colloquialism – courtesy of tech. “High levels of internet usage and heavy media multitasking are associated with decreased grey matter in prefrontal regions,” according to one piece of research. Another bit of analysis from Stanford University revealed that people who frequently use many types of media at once, or are heavy media multitaskers, have reduced memory and attention spans.
It’s why there is a growing movement to reclaim Sundays or implement a new iteration of the Sabbath by shunning devices for one day a week. Human Mobile Devices (HMD), a mobile phone manufacturer that champions the idea of building a healthier relationship with technology, launched its “Shut the Phone Up Sunday” initiative in February, encouraging people to reclaim their time and “mental clarity” by taking a break from their smartphone for one day a week.
While not weekly, global digital detox days encouraging participants around the world to unplug for 24 hours are regularly hosted by The Offline Club, which organises real-world, in-person events and hangouts. On Saturday (29 March), they even held a World Record attempt for the largest number of people simultaneously switching off their phones in London’s Primrose Hill.
“The need for time and space offline is more evident than ever,” says Ben Hounsell, head of the London chapter. “You often go to a restaurant and see a couple or family all have their phones on the table next to them. It’s a big problem in today’s society – it’s like there’s always a third person in the room, and that person is your phone.” Hounsell now asks people: how often are you alone with your thoughts? “People have forgotten what it’s like,” he says. “Boredom is virtually a luxury these days.”
In fact, “boredom” is often associated with Sundays when adults look back at their childhoods. And, as much as the word has negative connotations, it could be fundamental to sparking creativity and hatching new ideas. In one 2014 study examining the relationship between boredom and creative potential, participants were split into two groups, with one given something boring to do before embarking on a creative task. The result? “Boring” activities resulted in increased creativity. Scientists concluded that, in the absence of external stimuli, “attention is focused on internal processes and thoughts, thus generating new ideas”.
This phenomenon is something Tiffany Shlain, author of 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week, has discovered since she and her family introduced a weekly “tech shabbat” 16 years ago. “I have my best ideas [as an artist and a writer] on the day where I’m not getting deluged with input from the world,” she says. Though Jewish, Shlain is not religious – yet now swears by the practice of a screen-free Sabbath once a week, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. “A day of rest is this built-in practice that’s been around for thousands of years,” she says. “This is ancient wisdom, and any idea that’s been around that long and is still an idea is probably something we should look at.”
I have my best ideas on the day where I’m not getting deluged with input from the world
Tiffany Shlain
Shlain first started her practice following a turbulent period during which her father died and her daughter was born within the space of a few weeks. “It really was one of those moments where I felt like life was grabbing me by the shoulders and saying, ‘focus on what matters’,” she says. “I was really feeling distracted, like I couldn’t focus and I wasn’t present. I was everywhere and nowhere all the time with my phone – it was such an existential feeling.” The combination of birth and death acted as a wake-up call: “We were like, we have to live our lives differently. And we started turning off the screens.”
It has been, says Shlain, the best thing she has ever done – both in terms of connecting with family and as a means of individually recharging. “The longer I did it, the better I felt,” she adds. “It’s this incredible reset every week.”
Anyone can and should implement their own version of a tech shabbat, she urges, regardless of religion or background. Shlain advises getting prepared before you try it – writing down important phone numbers on a piece of paper in case of emergency, procuring an analogue or “dumbphone” if you don’t have a landline, handwriting directions to anywhere you want to go the next day – and focusing on making it a genuinely exciting prospect.
“I do recommend that families write down all the things you love to do that don’t involve screens, and do that for each member of your family, and make your Sabbath a day of doing those things,” she recommends. “And those of you that don’t have kids: just do what brings you joy and pleasure. People have forgotten how much they love to do without screens.”
This echoes what Gray picks out as being at the heart of reclaiming the old Sunday tradition: getting out in nature, meeting friends at the pub for a lazy afternoon of pints and chats and playing cards.
Hounsell’s top tip, meanwhile, is to start small if doing a whole day initially feels overwhelming: “Just try to get away from your phone for an hour before you go to bed and for an hour first thing when you wake up. I think that would be huge for a lot of people.”
However you put it into practice, reclaiming a day of rest could be the key to revolutionising your entire week. As Shlain puts it: “We just weren’t designed to be ‘on’ 24/7. There’s a reason the Sabbath is the fourth commandment – even before ‘Do not murder’, we were told to take a day off!”
