[This post is part of a series on creating happiness and reward by understanding pleasure. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]

Two days ago and yesterday I described how seeing how easily you can create physical pleasure in your life shows how easily you can create emotional pleasure — as much as you want.

Today I’ll go a step further — how to create as much reward as you want. Remember, emotional reward is the feeling that everything in the relevant cycle syncs with everything else. It encompasses emotional and physical pleasure and more.

Though in most cases emotional reward feels better and more all-encompassing than physical and emotional pleasure, it is easier to create because you can do it yourself. The key analogy here is

emotional pleasure : reward :: emotional environment  : emotional cycle

It feels better because it lasts longer and makes you feel better about more parts of your life. Generally when people feel a lot of emotional reward they describe the feeling as more spiritual or holistic.

If you don’t know the Model, you like to get that feeling, but you don’t know how to create it. That’s why people describe it so vaguely and it feels to them like it comes from outside them. When you know the Model, the feeling feels just as great, but you know where it came from and how to recreate it.

So reward is easy to create, feels as good or better than anything else, and you have all the tools you need to create it. What more could you want?

How do you create it? The short answer, in keeping with the past couple posts, is by analogy with creating physical and emotional pleasure.

To create physical pleasure, bring about things in your physical environment that are healthy for your body (or that were healthy for your ancestors) and avoid physically unhealthy things.

To create emotional pleasure, bring about things in your social environment that are healthy for your social life (or that were healthy for your ancestors) and avoid socially unhealthy things.

To create reward, synchronize the elements in your emotional cycles so they don’t conflict. Get your environments, beliefs, and emotions to bring about the emotions you like of the characteristics you want.

The long answer is to use the Method, which is rewarding in itself. The point of the last three posts was to show how straightforward making your life as fulfilling and rewarding as you like is. Just like filling your life with physical pleasure.

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