Back in the late 1800s, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed something odd about his garden: 20% of his pea pods produced 80% of the peas.
Intrigued, he began to look for this pattern elsewhere and soon found it in wealth distribution. In his day, it turned out that 80% of Italy's land was owned by just 20% of the population.
Since then, people have spotted this ratio everywhere. Around 80% of road traffic uses 20% of the roads. Most of us wear about 20% of our wardrobe 80% of the time. And a handful of your habits probably account for most of your stress, or most of your wellbeing.
This phenomenon became known as the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 rule), and it suggests that a small number of inputs tend to drive the majority of results.
Now, the exact ratio isn't set in stone. It could be 90/10, 70/30, or something else. The point is simply that a small portion of something accounts for a disproportionate amount of the results.
Which raises an interesting question: what if this applies to your happiness too?
What if a relatively small number of factors, attended to wisely, could account for most of your quality of life?
What if there were a handful of levers that, when adjusted, tended to shift everything else?
I believe this is the case, and that is the topic of this article.
Let's start with what I believe is the most critical lever of them all: your emotional state.
It impacts every aspect of your life because it is the filter through which you experience everything.
When you're feeling good, when your energy is high and you're relaxed and clear, the world looks different. Problems seem manageable. People seem friendlier. Life feels like it's on your side.
But when you're feeling low, anxious, or depleted, the same world looks entirely different. The same problems feel insurmountable. The same people feel irritating, and life is a slog.
Same world. Same problems. Same people. But if your emotional state changes, your entire experience of life changes with it.
Naturally, many factors influence your emotional state: your health, environment, and relationships, to name a few. But it's also interesting that we can shift it greatly simply by doing inner work.
So you don't have to wait until everything else in your life is perfect before you feel good. You can shift your emotional state without the external world changing one bit.
Meditate. Heal yourself with Reiki. There are so many things you can do, and for greater impact, I recommend starting your day with these things.
And this is where the Pareto Principle gets really interesting.
Even just 20 to 30 minutes of morning meditation or self-healing can shift your emotional state. And once that state shifts, it positively colours everything you experience throughout the day.
Your inner work will make you less reactive, more balanced, more optimistic, more energised, and happier.
Those teeny weeny 20 to 30 minutes might be the single highest-leverage investment of time you can make. They are a tiny input that influences everything else.
It's hard to see the present clearly when we're looking at it through the fog of the past.
Yet almost everyone is lugging around some part of their past with them.
They are carrying around what the Buddhists call samskaras: emotional residue stored in the body from old hurts, old fears, old disappointments.
Imagine you've had many bad experiences with a difficult colleague at work. They've been irritating you for years, and it's now got to the point that you only need to see them at the end of the corridor and you tense up.
Just one glimpse and your body braces, and your mood shifts, all before they've done or said anything.
And it can happen even if, on this particular occasion, they're in a friendly mood and have brought you coffee and donuts.
This is what unhealed emotional residue does. It colours everything. It makes it hard to fully engage with what's actually happening in the present moment because we're still reacting to what happened in the past.
So one of the greatest returns on investment we can make is to clear out our samskaras, our old hurts and wounds, the emotional gunk that weighs us down, causes stress, and affects our mood.
This is where meditation and healing work can be so valuable. Practise the right kind, and it can, bit by bit, release and heal the negative energy we've stored in the body.
Clear this energetic residue and you'll feel lighter. Clear it and you can finally start to see the present for what it is.
Note: If you want to learn the best techniques I know for this, check out my Mastering Your Past Meditation Course (linked below).
Lugging our past around with us is one way we suck the joy out of the present moment. Another is the way we talk to ourselves, especially when it involves self-criticism and negativity.
We criticise ourselves for mistakes. We berate ourselves for not being more successful. We hold ourselves to impossible standards and then feel terrible when we fall short.
Then we beat ourselves up for having negative thoughts, and enter a doom loop.
Of course, we might have greater self-awareness and try to replace negative thoughts with more positive ones, but if we're caught in the throes of strong emotion, it can still be next to impossible to do so.
And the reason is simple: our thoughts tend to reflect our emotional state.
If we're unsettled and angry, we'll tend to have unsettled, angry thoughts. But when we're calm and happy, we'll tend to have calm, happy thoughts.
So while it can be useful to monitor thoughts and consciously redirect them, we can also simplify things by going to the root cause: our emotional state.
This is where meditation and self-healing work can be so valuable. They soothe our being, raise our energy levels, and calm our mind, and as a result, nudge us in the direction of positive thoughts.
And those thoughts will, in turn, lead us to a greater state of wellbeing.
The philosopher Nietzsche once wrote: 'He who has a why to live for can bear almost any burden.'
If you think back over your life, you'll see this is true. If you find something meaningful, if you have a sense of purpose, you always find it much easier to deal with problems.
A sense of purpose gives you strength. It fuels you. It gives you energy to overcome obstacles.
But if you don't know why you are doing something, or you are doing it against your will, the very same obstacles can become crushing. They frustrate you. They drain you. They create psychological and emotional strain.
A lot of people associate purpose with their work, but it can come from many other places.
This matters if your current job isn't fulfilling and, due to necessity, you're not in a position to let it go. So long as you have a vision, your job can still be framed positively because it can fund you while you do other meaningful things, or develop skills for what you ultimately want to do.
The inner dimensions – your emotional state, healing the past, your relationship with yourself, and purpose – are foundational.
But we also live in bodies. If we neglect our bodies, everything else becomes harder.
Things get interesting when we apply the Pareto Principle and ask which health levers give the best ROI.
I don't want to harp on about the basics. I just want to make a few high-leverage points.
To begin with, sleep. You already know it's important. You already know we spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping, and yet, how good is your mattress and pillow?
For many people, they're kind of crappy. Think about that for a moment. You're going to spend more time on your mattress than almost any other object in your life, and it will make a huge difference to your sleep quality.
A comfortable pillow and proper blackout curtains can be small investments that pay dividends every single night.
Shoes are another overlooked lever. We're on our feet constantly, and the quality of footwear affects posture, back, joints, and overall comfort throughout the day.
Morning sunlight – even just 10 minutes outside early in the day – is another simple hack. It helps reset your circadian rhythm. It's free, quick, and it ripples through energy levels and sleep.
Finally, deep (abdominal), slow, nasal breathing works wonders on health and emotional state. It calms the nervous system and increases resilience.
We are aesthetic creatures. We feel and connect to our environment.
In many ways, our external environment is like an extension of ourselves, so it's unsurprising that our surroundings can have a profound impact on our psychological and emotional state.
An elegant café. A beautiful park. A tastefully decorated bedroom. Simple things, but their harmony can rub off on us so that in their presence, we feel more balanced.
Conversely, ugly, messy places can have the opposite effect. Clutter, for instance, tends to create tension in many people. It's as if the chaos of the external world gets absorbed into the inner one.
So consciously creating beautiful spaces can be a simple way to help yourself feel more at ease.
As a healer, you might also find that a dedicated healing or meditation space, even if it's small, makes a surprising difference. It becomes an unconscious cue that it's time to practise, and time to soften.
Here's a Pareto insight: 20% of your interactions probably give you 80% of your social nourishment.
So it's worth identifying which relationships those are.
Spend time with people who leave you feeling better than before, who lift you up rather than drain you.
And remember it's not only about whether you enjoy someone's company. It's also about who you become around them.
Some people bring out your pettiness, insecurities, and small self. Others bring out your generosity, wisdom, and lightness.
As we grow, some relationships will no longer serve us. Moving on doesn't mean they were 'wrong'. It simply means it's time for something new.
People change, grow, evolve. A fulfilled life involves growth, and growth necessitates change.
So we can be grateful for the time shared and the lessons learned, yet still know it's time to move on, or at least reduce how much time we spend with certain people.
Finding the right community matters too, especially for healers. It's easy to feel isolated with spiritual practice. Easy to feel misunderstood.
That's why regular courses, retreats, and practice events can be so valuable. They connect you to like-minded souls and remind you that you're not crazy to value things mainstream culture often overlooks.
Most of us spend a huge portion of our waking hours at work, so few things are as important as improving our work experience.
One thing to remember: it's easier to maintain a good energetic state than to will yourself into one when things get challenging.
That's why a pre-work ritual is so valuable.
Apart from morning meditation or self-healing, a short ritual where you focus on uplifting precepts – like the Reiki precepts or 'The Four Agreements' – can help cultivate calm and balance throughout the day.
It's like installing a positive operating system into your being, an emotional GPS that guides you to more harmonious lands.
You're not just reacting to whatever comes at you. You've set an intention. You've primed yourself. You've begun crafting a more enlightened day.
If you think about what affects your happiness, you'll come up with many factors beyond what I've listed here.
The key takeaway is simple: look for the few things that make the big difference.
If you want to 'Pareto' your life, you could do worse than focus on the things that shift your emotional state, because it is the great filter through which you experience life.
So find the things that enhance your emotions. Find the things that elevate them, and do more of them.
It's not rocket science, but a few small changes really can make a big difference.
Just like 20% of Pareto's pea pods produced 80% of his peas, 20% of the things you do might well contribute to 80% of your happiness.
(Article by Om Reiki Founder, Jeremy O'Carroll)
Want to clear the emotional residue of the past?
If you want to learn the most effective techniques I know for releasing old emotional patterns and redesigning your energy body, explore my Mastering Your Past Meditation Course on the Mastering Your Past homepage.
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