The market is melting… but there’s one thing I realized today that actually calmed me down

So, I had one of those moments today where you stare at the red candles long enough that you don’t even feel fear anymore... just a weird, peaceful numbness.
Like, “that’s my portfolio. And yes, it’s currently doing a reenactment of the Titanic.”

But after the initial panic, something clicked for me.

Every time we get a major selloff, everyone (including me) starts obsessing over the same things:

• “Is this the start of a bear market?”
• “Should I sell now and buy back lower?”
• “What if this time… it actually doesn’t recover?”

And then I took a step back and asked myself a different question:

“If this exact chart had shown up in 2020, 2018, or 2015… what would people have done knowing what came next?”

We always think we’re living in the one moment where everything is different, but the thing that stood out to me today was how predictable people’s emotions are.

Not the prices... the emotions.

Here’s the pattern I've noticed across every painful dip I've lived through:

1. The crash feels uniquely catastrophic. (“This one is different, I swear.”)
2. People think everyone else must know something they don’t. (Spoiler: they don’t.)
3. Long-term fundamentals don’t change nearly as fast as prices do. (If they did, this industry would have died 50 times already.)
4. The people who assumed the world was ending end up regretting it the most. (Ask anyone who sold in March 2020 how that went.)
5. When the recovery comes, it feels “too late” to everyone who waited. (Same movie, new actors.)

I’m not saying “just buy the dip bro” or that this crash is bullish.
What I am saying is:

Fear feels real, but it’s almost always temporary.
And if you zoom out even a little bit, the market’s behavior looks a lot less like chaos and a lot more like… routine human psychology repeating itself in loud colors.

So today, instead of panicking, I did something I’ve literally never done during a crash:

I went for a walk.

Didn’t check charts.
Didn’t stare at liquidation numbers.
Didn’t refresh Twitter like an addict.

When I came back, the market was still red... but my brain wasn’t.

And honestly? That felt like the actual win.

Whether this takes a week or six months to recover, the only thing I know for sure is this:

We underestimate how much emotional resilience matters in trading.
Not intelligence. Not timing.
Just the ability to not self-destruct during moments like this.

Anyway, stay safe out there.
And if your portfolio is currently screaming, just know... so is everyone else’s.
We’re all in the same boat, even if that boat feels like it’s on fire right now.