Oliver Munday for NPR
Elysia Berman remembers the moment she realized her shopping was out of control. Last December, she ducked into a store to buy a pair of gloves. And she came out with a $600 coat she didn’t need and couldn’t afford.
“That was my breaking point,” she recalls.
So Berman, 35, decided to do something drastic. She’d try the no-buy challenge, a popular social media experiment that encourages people to buy less stuff. For a set time period — in her case, a whole year — she’d stop spending money on non-essential items. No clothes. No makeup. No home decor. Instead, she’d use