Learn To Embrace Your Imperfections

It can be very difficult to reconcile our own lives and experiences with those that we see of others' on a daily basis. While social media, blogs, up to minute news feeds, and an ever increasing amount of 'reality' TV shows provide platforms to share ideas, they also often give the picture of overly perfect lives and fuel unrealistic expectations in a world where people can quickly be left feeling inadequate. This is no more true than in the realm of lifestyle, homeware, food and cookery, where there are literally millions of shows and people out there giving us tips on how to cook, how to decorate our homes, or how to stay healthy.

Many watch the shows or read the feeds looking to gleam insights, when in reality many of us struggle to find the time to do anything other than sleeping, going to work and doing chores, let alone spending hours cleaning and cooking every night like it seems everyone is managing to do. The truth is however that most people actually don't. The pressures we are all putting on ourselves to live up to these standards and unwritten rules of modern living mean that we can often miss out of just sitting back and taking the opportunity to enjoy life. It is for this reason the aim of IKEA's "Let's Relax" campaign to compare and highlight people's expectations with what is realistically achievable in the time we have available.

Asking 1000 people about the things that stress them out most about life at home, IKEA's 'Life At Home' report found that many people lack of time to cook meals at home and those living by themselves often missed having someone there to eat with. They also found that many people view their homes as too messy or small to invite visitors in, and so don't feel comfortable with having friends over. Even when it's just by themselves there also seems to be growing anxiety about needing to make sustainable choices, and cutting down on waste.

The video above mocks the modern notion that food and meal times must be shared with everyone else online, and that we somehow to gain approval from our peers that what we're doing and eating is of a necessary standard. Showing that in reality things don't have to be as perfect as we think. It helps promote the idea that we should remember what it's like to simply enjoy our food and each other's company.

Looking further in depth at what participants told them, and giving some suggestion on how we should we embracing our seemingly imperfect lives, learn more about IKEA's 'Life at Home' report here.