When you encounter a positive feeling, you will tend toward seeking to preserve it. You will undertake behaviors that sustain the present good feeling instead of investing the present good feeling for the greatest good feeling in the future. This is why it is so difficult to start the next task after finishing a goal, or to get down to work when you feel euphoric.
This pattern of behavior is not too different from how people react to sudden windfalls of cash. Those who win lotteries are much more likely to spend their newfound wealth on short term pleasure instead of using it to preserve or grow their assets.
In each moment, we receive the dividends of our past actions. While you don’t have a choice to avoid suffering, you do have the choice of how much you use it to improve yourself and others. Good choices tend to frontload suffering, and always pay a return on the investment. Poor choices do not escape suffering; they only delay it, and at a very high price. For example, the pain of regret never goes away without paying the price of the honesty you refused to initially exercise, plus all the interest you have accrued in delaying it.
Just as there is a difference between building a dividend and paying it out, there is a difference between creating positive outcomes and enjoying them. Just as with good financial choices, with practice and intent, you can learn to merge the good feelings of the result with how you feel in the actions that produce it. Those who are successful tend to associate positive feelings with what generates them instead of a separate phenomenon. For them, the reward is less separable from what generated it.
Doing what it takes to feel good does not feel good until you’ve amounted so much experience that you’ve conditioned yourself into a deep expectation of relatively constant good feelings through tenaciously consistent best action in spite of unrelenting bad feelings.
When you repeat an action over time, the feelings of the effects will merge to become experienced during the cause. The stronger and more correct your beliefs, and the more continuously you live up to them, the more you will come to associate good feelings with the actions that generate them. Consider, for example, what happens to a person who establishes a habit of health. When they first begin eating healthy foods, exercising, and getting sufficient sleep, they will see all of these things as a sacrifice. Within a short time, they will see so many benefits and tie them so strongly to the inputs that generate them that they will feel the endorphins of a workout as they workout, see sleep as much more valuable than anything else they might otherwise do, and healthy foods as being more satisfying than alternatives.