Negative Emotions and Motivation
Negative emotions cause more than just emotional pain. Negative emotions can affect personal motivation.
Negative Emotions Can Cause Low Motivation
Negative emotions may lower your motivation. When your motivation is low, your ability to act is stopped. The hallmarks of people who suffer from depression are passivity and listlessness.
If negative emotions reduce motivation then they affect your ability to take action in the world. For someone who is in a low mood, it often seems reasonable to delay, defer or even cancel personal action.
Negative Emotion Can Also Cause High Motivation, But Only Temporarily
Negative emotions can also have the opposite effect, they can increase motivation. When faced with extreme anger and sadness, people sometimes respond with massive action and desperately act to make the pain stop. There are many examples of people who become workaholics after the death of a loved one. However, if the negative emotions do not let up after a period of time, then helpless and hopeless feelings arise (in addition to the original anger and sadness) and then squelch action.
