The Joy of Less

Now more than ever, we live in a society where we covet new and shiny things. Not only has consumption risen dramatically over the last 60 years, but we are damaging the environment at the same time. That is why buying quality and why Tara Button's Buy Me Once brand has such popular appeal. Tara Button has become a champion of a lifestyle called 'mindful curation' - a way of living in which we carefully choose each object in our lives....

Meet Emily and Paul: The parents of two young children, Emily is the newly promoted VP of marketing at a large corporation while Paul works from home or from clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.

After suffering a brain injury, Jane McGonigal came up with a game to help aid her recovery and battle the ensuing depression she experienced. Half a million people have now played this game to astonishing results: depression gone in six weeks in some cases and even terminal cancer patients reporting that playing the game gives them a sense of control over their own health.

While the world seems to be in love with the idea of tiny houses and minimalism, real women with real families who are constantly growing and changing simply can't purge it all and start from nothing. Yet a home with too much stuff is a home that is difficult to maintain, so where do we begin? Add in paralyzing emotional attachments and constant life challenges, and it can feel almost impossible to make real decluttering progress.

"The dirty little secret about most organizing advice is that it's written by organized people," says blogger, speaker, and decluttering expert Dana K. White. "But that's not how my brain works. I'm lost on page three." Dana blogs at A Slob Comes Clean, chronicling her successes and failures with her self-described "deslobification process". In the beginning she used the name Nony (short for aNONYmous), because she was sharing her deep, dark slob secret. Now she has truly come clean - with not only her real name but the strategies she has developed.

From the author who brought you the 'genius' best sellers The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F--k and Get Your Sh*t Together. In The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F--k, our favourite 'anti-guru' Sarah Knight unleashed the power of saying no. In Get Your Sh*t Together, she prioritised the sh*t you need and want to do so you can achieve your hopes and dreams. Now she's back, doubling down on your happiness with her latest message: You Do You.

In this era of mass consumption, we are all drowning in 'stuff', despite our best efforts to keep on top of the clutter that collects in our homes, our office spaces and even our cars. All this clutter causes us mental anguish. However, as we all know, throwing things away can be difficult - it clashes with the values instilled in us from an early age of not wasting things, reusing items and keeping things 'for a rainy day'. Simply put, we feel guilty about getting rid of things. Enter Nagisa Tatsumi and her bold suggestion - that it's okay to throw stuff away.

Spark Joy is an in-depth, room-by-room guide to decluttering and organising your home. It covers every room in the house, from bedrooms and kitchens to bathrooms and living rooms, as well as a wide range of items in different categories, including clothes, photographs, paperwork, books, cutlery, cosmetics, shoes, bags, wallets and valuables. The secret to Marie Kondo's unique and simple KonMari tidying method is to focus on what you want to keep, not what you want to get rid of.

Emotions feel automatic to us; that's why scientists have long assumed that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications not only for psychology but also medicine, the legal system, airport security, child-rearing, and even meditation.

In her late 20s, Cait Flanders found herself stuck in the consumerism cycle that grips so many of us: earn more, buy more, want more, rinse, repeat. Even after she worked her way out of nearly $30,000 of consumer debt, her old habits took hold again. When she realized that nothing she was doing or buying was making her happy - only keeping her from meeting her goals - she decided to set herself a challenge: she would not shop for an entire year. The Year of Less documents Cait's life for 12 months during which she bought only consumables.

Why is it that even the most disorganised person never seems to lose their toothbrush? How can this simple fact solve all our clutter problems? The Toothbrush Principle is a simple yet inspired approach to de-cluttering your home. Whether you live in a mansion or a bedsit, this book will show you how to: organise according to the unconscious blueprint that naturally tidy people have, so that getting and staying organised is easy....

Based on a legendary course Roth has taught at Stanford University for several decades, The Achievement Habit employs the remarkable insights that stem from design thinking to help us realize the power we all have within to change our lives for the better. By ridding ourselves of issues that stand in the way of reaching our full potential, we gain the confidence finally to do things we've always wanted to do.

In 2014, Elizabeth and Nate Thames were conventional 9-5 young urban professionals. But the couple had a dream to become modern-day homesteaders in rural Vermont. Determined to retire as early as possible in order to start living each day - as opposed to wishing time away working for the weekends - they enacted a plan to save an enormous amount of money: well over 70 percent of their joint take-home pay. Dubbing themselves the Frugalwoods, Elizabeth began documenting their unconventional frugality and the resulting wholesale lifestyle transformation on their eponymous blog.

If simplicity is an art, then Dominique Loreau is a master. Having lived in Japan for many years and inspired by oriental philosophy, Dominique Loreau discovered the beauty of a life well lived through the art of simplicity. Her lifestyle rests on the principle of 'less is more' and imbues all areas of existence, from the material to the spiritual.

Lee Lipsenthal had a charmed life: married to the love of his life, the proud father of two remarkable children, working as medical director of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute. In his personal relationships and with his patients, Lee was committed to living his life fully and gratefully each day. The power of those beliefs was tested in July 2009, when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, leaving him with a 90 percent chance of dying within five years.