The emergence of hydrodynamic attractors has provided a successful framework for understanding the hydrodynamic evolution in strongly interacting systems far from equilibrium. Hydrodynamic attractors studied in the context of high-energy nuclear collisions explain the fluid-like dynamics of the monotonically expanding quark-gluon plasma formed in such collisions. \\\\ In this talk, I will discuss the emergence of the hydrodynamic attractor in expanding systems and examine how the inclusion of a spontaneous symmetry-breaking (SSB) mechanism modifies the behaviour of the attractor. I will conclude with a discussion of attractors and SSB in the context of cold atomic systems, where hydrodynamic attractors have also been studied theoretically in recent work.