Before BreakfastHow to stress less and be gentle on yourself, with Courtney Carver
Minimalism expert Courtney Carver shares tips on building habits, organizing life, and getting the stuff under control
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning, This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they might have for the rest of us. So today I am delighted to welcome Courtney Carver to the show. Courtney has a devoted following for her teachings on minimalism and simplicity. Lots of people have been inspired by her project three thirty three Minimalist Fashion Challenge. She is the author of the book Soulful Simplicity and the brand new book Gentle, which bills itself about being how to rest more stress less, live the life you actually want. Things. We are all into here. So Courtney, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm happy to chat with you again.
Yeah, well, maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit more more about yourself.
Oh wow, you summed it up so nicely.
Well, I don't know, fun fact, anything else you want to share.
I live in Salt Lake City, and as you mentioned, this is my third book and I've been writing and kind of being in the online world since twenty ten, which feels like two minutes ago and one hundred years ago. So sometimes I don't know how to feel about that, but I'm happy to be here and love, love, love what I do, and have simplified my life over that time span and even prior after being diagnosed with MS in two thousand and six, which really is what propelled me into looking at ways to have less stress in my life and feel healthier and more content with what I have.
Yeah, well, let's talk about that with the MS angle there, because you've written very openly about that, which I really appreciate. But you had gotten your diagnosis, I mean, your health was in not a great place I assume at the point of getting the diagnosis, and you're facing down treatments for that and uncertainty of how this is all going to go. I mean, what made the link between that and simplifying things? I mean what occurred there that made you think, well, this is the direction I should be going.
Well, I never really thought that for a long time because when I was diagnosed, I was working in advertising sales, lots of deadlines. It was in magazines, so really quick turnarounds and lots and lots of work, always over extending myself, really wanting to achieve some level of success, although I defined success much differently then than I do now. But all that to say, just doing whatever I could to keep climbing the ladder, and in addition to that, doing everything else, raising a child, you know, having just life like everyone else. And I was so exhausted, and by the time I got sick, so scared and didn't know what to do. I had really no idea what was going to happen, other than I had done a little bit of research about how people live well with MS, and so much of what I found, outside of conventional meds which I do take, is lowering stress. And I wanted to win at that too, So I was like, I'm going to get rid of all stress.
We're going to win at the Low Stress Challenge here, That's.
Right, And that was my focus. And it took me a little while to see that as I was reducing the stressful things in my life, what I really was doing was simplifying. I was removing things that really removed me from my life, and that extended or started, I guess with different food. I was experimenting with like what made me feel really good, and that's changed over the years, of course, but clutter, debt, job stress, like from every different direction. As long as I could see it acknowledge it, I could simplify it.
Yeah, and the good news you've been pretty stable then for the last few years.
Is that correct? My neurologist often says, it's like your MS is in suspended animation and I haven't had a relapse or anything change on like MRI brain scans since two thousand and seven.
Wonderful. So well, that is a long time from now. I was right in the past, I mean, is it is a really long time. My oldest child was born in two thousand and seven and we're shipping them off to college, so it's it's very, very wonderful. What are the things you write about related to sort of reducing stress and monitoring your energy? I mean, people who are dealing with chronic health conditions may have to approach this from a different perspective than lots of other people. And you've had a fascinating metaphor in your book, which I think you've said came from elsewhere, but about spoons that you only have so many spoons. Can you explain this a little bit more right?
It's called the spoon theory. And the person who kind of identified this I always mispronounced her last name, which I feel terrible about, but I believe her name is Christine Miserindino. I might have actually said it right that time. Great, but she was explaining to a friend how their energy was different. And we always measure things like time and money pretty easily, but we don't measure our energy. We just spend it until we're completely spent and then hope that it comes back the next day. And for some people that works great for a while, but generally I find chronic illness are not. That's hard to maintain that like go do it all at all costs for a very long time. And so with the spoon theory, you kind of assign units of energy to each spoon, And so you might have ten spoons for the day, and getting breakfast ready and the kids off to school takes two spoons, but on a day that you may be low of energy, it might take four spoons. And so it's just a way of minding how you are exerting yourself during the day and maybe saving some for later. Or saving some for you or not completely running out every day.
Yeah. Yeah, well it's a good thing to think about in general, I mean managing energy and what you said, like for a lot of people, having a good night's sleep does in fact mostly charge you back up. I mean I think about like plugging an iPad in overnight and in the morning it is in fact charge and you know that's great. But obviously if you're not completely charging it, then you know you're not dealing with a full load.
I guess that's it, right, right, Or if you have other circumstances that where you naturally start out with lower energy. You were asking kind of what I write about, and on my site, I write about simplifying your life, anything from becoming debt free to clutter free to cleaning out your closet, things like that. At least that's what I started writing about. And then the more that I talk to people who were working on it and saw how it was different from person to person is when I really started thinking about different approaches, like moving more slowly, being gentle, being good to yourself, conserving that energy, and maybe not making the end goal the primary focus.
Yeah, well, we're going to talk a little bit more about what it means to be gentle. In just a minute, we're going to take one quick ad break. Well, I am back with Courtney Carver, who is the author of the brand new book Gentle, which is about how to rest, more, stress less live the life you actually want. So, Courtney, what does it mean to be gentle? I mean you talk in this book a lot about gentle you. What is this state of gentle you?
Yeah, Well, the gentle you or the gentle me, I think is who we are inherently. I think it's the inside voice that we can connect with once we stop being crazy busy all the time, once we start really paying attention to how we feel and what we want instead of listening to all of those outside voices and kind of bowing to that external pressure that we all face from time to time. So really checking in. And I mean we spread this advice to each other all the time, like, oh, be gentle with yourself, but how often do we turn that on ourselves? And to take it a step further, Once you learn how to connect with the gentle you, you can start making decisions in advance of having to be gentle, so that the steps that you're taking are more gentle and feel better.
Yeah, what would be an example of that, Like a decision you might make an advance in order to be more gentle on yourself.
Sure, like if I put it around decluttering, for instance, which is something that I talk about a lot, is I think people get really overwhelmed with making decisions about decluttering, like what should I donate, what should I sell? What should I throw away? What should I recycle? And those decisions get to be so big that they often stop us before we do anything, And so coming up with a gentler approach makes a lot of sense. For instance, instead of donating anything or making any of those decisions, just hide it all, like, put it all in a box, get it out of sight, and give yourself a minute. See what it's like to live without all that extra stuff, and then see if you even remember what when in the boxes. In my experience, it's it doesn't happen very often, and then it's so much easier to let go because you're not dealing with that stress of the emotional connection that you have from seeing things every single day.
Yeah, exactly, Well, I wonder if you have any daily routines so I know our listeners always love to hear about people's morning routines or any other sort of daily rituals they have in their life.
Yeah. I'm pretty routined, actually, and especially in the morning. I go to bed early, and I wake up pretty early around usually around five five point thirty, and I like to drink a lot of water first thing in the morning, and then I write three pages of morning pages Julia Cameron, and then from there it depends. Today. For instance, I went to the gym. I have a walking pad under my desk where I work, but sometimes in the morning, if it's dark and cold out and I don't want to go outside, I'll do a little walk on the walking pad. And I also generally talk to either or both my sister and my daughter in the morning, so we have a really fun, just catch up conversation. And it's just a great way to start the day feeling really connected to people who I love, and also having moved my thoughts off my brain and moved my body a little bit. That's kind of the beginning of my day.
Wonderful. And in the book Gentle you talk about like if people want to build a morning routine, the problem is often we're like Okay, Well, I'm going to start by, you know, running six miles every day, getting up an hour and a half earlier that I normally do. And that seems to be setting ourselves up for failure? Can you talk about it perhaps slightly more sustainable approach?
Sure? So I started my morning routine when I shortly after I was diagnosed with MS, when my daughter was young and at home. She's still young, but you know, like child, and I had a full time job working for someone else, so my mornings were very limited, and my morning routine started at five minutes. So I spent five minutes stretching out on my yoga mat. And of course it wasn't this like big yoga practice for five minutes. However, it was five minutes of me getting out of bed going to my yoga mat. And then a week later I added five minutes of meditation, and then the week after that five minutes of journaling. So I had this fifteen minute routine after three weeks. And from there, and this is where I often lose people. I added one minute to each activity each week, only one minute. So that's a three month and it's total, which sounds like nothing, but I mean today I still have a morning routine that I practice, even though it's not yoga meditate right. Things are in different order. I bring new things in depending on the season and how I feel. But I have that framework, and I really believe it's because I finally said, Okay, I am not the kind of person who can start something at an hour or a half hour or whatever it is. It has to be by the minute. And that helped.
Yeah, well, and you get there eventually, like in three minute chunks. You will eventually get to a longer period of time, sure, and probably sustainably, Whereas if you start with way more than you can take on at the beginning, you will just not get there no matter. That's how I did get there in six months than not.
Yeah, all my habit changes were like, okay, now we have to go to the gym for an hour a day or do the five miles of walking right away. And it never lasted. And it was always this constant like start a new habit and then it would fall off, and then start something and then it would fall off. And eventually all of that, like not being able to hold on to it. I started to kind of look at well, before I looked at changing how I've changed. I beat myself up a lot, like, why aren't you the most disciplined person that can do this? What's wrong with you?
Yeah, well, it turns out not to be very productive to do that.
That's true.
But let's talk about something that people have found incredibly useful, your project three thirty three. So if somebody was hunting around online, there's a good chance if they came across you, they would come across this because I think a lot of people have found this fashion challenge very inspiring. So maybe you can talk a little bit about what that is.
Sure, Well, in the beginning of my decluttering days, I didn't count closet things because I loved to shop for my closet and I believed at the time that shopping reduced stress for me. It felt good to go and buy something new. And what I wasn't considering is all the stress that came later with credit card debt and having too much stuff. And so I decided to finally take a good look at my closet. I knew that my slow and steady approach wasn't really going to work in this case, and I created a challenge where for three months I would dress with thirty three items or less, including clothing, jewelry, accessories, and shoes. And just to put things in perspective, I wouldn't doubt that I had thirty three pair of shoes when I started this, So it was a big change for me. And I thought I would only do it for three months, and I mean, here we are fifteen years later and I'm still doing it. So thirty three items every three months, and it's just a really nice way to eliminate decision fatigue. Choose the items that you want and need for that time period and then forget about the rest. It sounds sometimes to some people like that won't be enough. To others it sounds like way too much. So if you just have to kind of see for yourself, there's no real magic to the number thirty three, So your number might be thirty five or twenty five, but just play around with it and see. And for people who often tell me they could never get to thirty five, I just remind them that it's a three month challenge, so you can do it and just hide the rest of the stuff for three months, and if you hate it along the way or it's causing more stress, bring the stuff back. But for me, it's reduced a lot of stress, spending and really energy that I was devoting towards something that I don't really care about.
Yeah. Well, and the upside of it being three months, I mean you can then plan seasonally, right, so it's you know, you've got a lot of sweaters in that thirty three items, whereas in the summer, and I presume there are fewer sweaters in the thirty three items, And you can also have some new excitement about your wardrobe every three months. Then, because I assume you're switching a lot of things.
Out, well, you could, and some people do. I generally tend not to switch a ton out, like obviously to your point, I bring in more sweaters in the winter, and I probably have more dresses in the summer. But I would say like between fall and winter, I'm maybe switching out five or six items and saying from like spring to summer, so it's not a big shift. I don't have thirty three different items for each season. But I think you learn so much just after the first three months about what you really enjoy, because chances are a lot of people listening to this are already doing this. But they still have all the other stuff in their closet, but they're wearing their favorite things every day. But now you don't have to look at that other stuff and feel what I felt, which was stress for spending too much seeing items that had tags still hanging, wondering what I was thinking, or keeping things that people had given me that I didn't like. So I'm much happier with a teeny tiny wardrobe now.
Yeah, Well, what at this point would it take to get you to buy something new? I mean, at what point do you add something new into the rotation?
Ah? Well, if I needed something, like if something was worn out or I spilled something on something, and I mean, I'm not going to I'm not really suffering through here. If I need to buy something new, I will, but I generally don't want to, and oftentimes I'll just replace something that I already have because I have found it so freeing to not really care that much about new things. I gave a lot of time and energy and money to that for a big portion of my life. And also to see that people don't really notice that was great because then I was like, if they don't notice this what I'm wearing, what else don't they notice in my life, you know, I became much more free to make decisions without worrying about Oh I wonder how this person's going to think about this exactly.
Well, we'll talk a little bit more about worrying when we come back from our next break. Well, I am back with Courtney Carver. She is the author of the brand new book Gentle, which is about how to rest, more, stress less live the life you actually want. We've been talking about her project three thirty three Minimalist Wardrobe Challenge. But one of the topics you cover in Gentle is worrying less. And for people who worry a lot, sometimes that feels a little bit like, well, now I have one more thing to worry about, which is that I'm supposed to be worrying less. So I wonder if there are some practical tips you have for reducing the worry load people who are prone to that.
Of course, I think that worrying can I mean, everybody knows how much it can weigh us down, and of course there will always be some worries for us. However, I think that there are steps we can take to not spin the worry around and get lost in the worry. Things that work well for me are to write down my worries. When I see them on paper, sometimes they don't seem as real, and I also can see what is within my control and what really isn't. Like if there's something I can do to be proactive here and shut the worry down, I want to do it. But if there isn't, which is normally the case, then to have to see it on paper helps. And I know some people who don't enjoy writing will take like audio notes and just speak their worry because otherwise, when it's all living up in our head, it just goes around and around and around, and it gets worse and worse, and then we can't sleep and then it feels even more worrisome. So for sure, I think writing it down is a big help. And then to really reflect on past worries and what's happening in our lives. Most of the things that happen to us or in our lives aren't the things we were worried about, which again very freeing to be able to say, okay, maybe this is a stretch. I don't have to worry about this. And then probably the simplest thing to do is to distract yourself to break yourself out of that worry loop. So whether it's listening to a podcast, putting on one of your favorite movies, anything to distract yourself from that line of thinking can help.
Awesome awesome, Well, Courtney, what is something you have done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Woo? I think what I do almost every day now to take a day from great to awesome is I romanticize the things that are already happening in my life and turn them into simple pleasures. For instance, having a cup of coffee. I have a coffee every day, at least one, and it used to just be that thing that you had to get the fuel, But now it's a whole thing, Like I really take great joy and preparing it and having that first sip and noticing how it smells, and maybe talking to my sister as I mentioned, and she's having a coffee as well, So making it really fun and happy. The little things that are already happening every day really helps me elevate.
A day wonderful. And what are you looking forward to right now?
What am I looking forward to? That's such a good question. I mean, I think right now work wise, I'm looking forward to bringing Gentle to the world, and maybe by the time it's airs it will already be out. But writing a book, as you know, takes a long time from thinking about it to writing it to actually having it ready for people to read. So I'm really looking forward to people reading that.
Awesome Well, Courtney, where can people find you?
They can find me at beMore with less dot com or on Instagram at be more with Less.
Awesome Well, Courtney, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to everyone who has been listening. If you have feedback on this or any other episode of Before Breakfast, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
