Decluttered and healthy with Courtney Carver

Full Frame

Minimalism is about living with less, simplifying your life, and finding happiness. But what about health benefits – can minimalism improve your physical body as well as your psyche?

Decluttered and healthy with Courtney Carver

Minimalism is about living with less, simplifying your life, and finding happiness. But what about health benefits – can minimalism improve your physical body as well as your psyche?

Like many other Americans, Courtney Carver was stressed and overworked. She shopped for fun and constantly accumulated things.

“Maybe I told myself I was buying things because they would bring me joy,” she said. “But I was really buying to medicate myself from feeling the stress and being overwhelmed and working too hard.”

The quick dose of happiness from buying was followed by bills. The debt, she said, piled up, only adding to her stress.

But after receiving a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis in 2006, Carver decided she needed to change her life.

She started with her diet, removing the foods that put stress on her body to improve her health. This quickly expanded to all aspects of her life, minimizing furniture and the family debt. With her new minimalist lifestyle, her stress quickly faded and Carver said she is now healthier than ever.

“For me, the decluttering is not about necessarily not owning the stuff or just having less, it’s really, for me, about love and health,” she said.

If it had not been for her MS diagnosis, Carver would not be a minimalist, but she also might still be stressed.

“Getting diagnosed with MS gave me permission to be really selfish and think about my health and wellbeing and know that, if I always look after that first,” she said. “Everything else will fall into place.”

Her healthy minimalist lifestyle has not only brought newfound purpose. Minimalism has also seeped into her family’s lives. Careful about her purchases, Carver has shown her daughter the joys and benefits of a minimalist lifestyle. Her daughter is now traveling the world, living with less and experiencing more – all with no student debt.

She runs Be Less with More, a simple living website, where she helps readers become a minimalist in their own way. Minimalism, she said, looks different for everyone.

Courtney Carver sits down with Mike Walter to discuss the hidden medicine of living a simple life. Check out this week’s episode of Full Frame to learn Courtney Carver’s seven simple steps to becoming a minimalist.

Follow Courtney Carver on Twitter: @bemorewithless