Hello listeners welcome back my name is Stephanie Sefarian and you're listening to

episode 319 of sustainable minimalist and today's show we are discussing what

research says is the connection between minimalism and well-being. There are lots of stories

online, lots of testimonials online, lots of anecdotal evidence discussing the ways in which a minimalist less is more lifestyle

can improve our overall health. But today instead of talking about anecdotes and

personal testimonials, I first wanted to examine what

research actually says about the benefits of minimalist living on our health. Here today to help me do this is Jerry and Shannon

Arner. They are bloggers and podcasters over at Arner Adventures.com and so Jerry and Shannon are here today to help break down what science says about

minimalism and then they are here to also apply those minimalist living benefits to their own experience.

Now they have quite a phenomenal story as to how they found and embraced minimalism.

I'm not going to ruin that story for them. I'm going to let them tell it to you.

Jerry and Shannon, so thrilled to have you on the show. How are you? We're great. We're great.

We're so excited to be a guest on your show. We're big fans of the show and learn so much from it.

I'm just really excited to be here. Yeah, it's all it's just something to when you've been a fan of somebody for a while to be one of the guests all of a

sudden we've been listening to all the other ones this is really fun.

Yeah I'm thrilled to have you on and I want to start by learning more about you both.

How did you find yourself interested in minimalism?

How did you find yourself blogging about the lifestyle?

Maybe Shannon, you can start us off with this.

Sure and I will give the very abbreviated version because I could go into that for a

while but in a nutshell Jerry I, we owned our own business in the pet industry, and we grew very fast.

We had it for a number of years, but once we grew to what we thought was going to be the goal,

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