This 3-Pillar Framework Will Help You Dominate the Next Market Crash
Boost your mental toughness
Investing is more psychology than three-page matrix calculations of future cash flows.
I’m no psychologist but I experienced bear markets in 2020 and 2022 and a near crash in March/April 2025. I never dumped a stock in panic.
Holding my assets through those sh!tstorms helped me build a multi-six-figure portfolio.
But quite a few people sell. How do I know? The selling always begins slowly and accelerates toward the bottom.
Because most selling happens at the end, people lose money, then wait for months before entering the market again, and miss out on the biggest returns.
Asking you to stay invested is useless when emotions dominate your decisions. You need a mindset shift to stay on track.
Here’s how to weather market sell-offs.
1. Ditch your negative thoughts
I started taking my diet seriously after a business trip to the Middle East.
I was there during the Muslim fasting holiday of Ramadan. Eating wasn’t allowed before sunset.
Supermarkets and restaurants were closed until 7 pm. The only option was McDonald’s (and you weren’t allowed to eat inside).
More negative thoughts started to circulate through my mind after a few days of cheeseburgers. It’s a slow process you hardly notice.
But when your girlfriend says on WhatsApp video calls you smile less often and you catch yourself swearing at every little thing, you know you’re going in the wrong direction.
When I returned home, I came across Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life. He says in the first chapter that when his clients have mental issues, he begins by asking them what they eat for breakfast.
That’s where it clicked. Your diet affects your thoughts.
Fruits and vegetables are a must. But I found they’re not best for my breakfast.
I wake up hungry and need fuel immediately. Porridge with Greek yoghurt keeps me going for a couple of hours.
Porridge is carbs, Greek yoghurt is proteins. And it’s better for you in the morning than coffee.
I delay my first coffee intake by two hours after waking up. The science behind that isn’t clear to me but I just have persistent bitterness in my mouth and throat after drinking coffee first thing in the morning.
When I go to the canteen at lunchtime, I avoid carb bombs like pasta. There are hardly any nutrients there. Better have a bowl of vegetable soup.
And in the evening, more vegetables follow with red meat or chicken.
I can’t stress the positive effect of a good diet on your physical health.
You avoid junk food so there’s no guilt. You keep your self-respect for not giving in to stuff that harms your body. Fruits, veggies, and meat give your body nutrients without piling on to your waistline. And those nutrients nourish your brain cells too.
It’s crucial during market sell-offs. You could stop reading the news or checking your portfolio. But you can’t escape the negativity altogether unless you cut ties with social media.
A healthy diet limits your negative thoughts. Keep an eye on what you eat to stay focused on your long-term investing goals.
2. Make your mornings hard deliberately
It’s hard to be a reasonable human when your portfolio is -20% and sinking. So make your day even harder (to eventually make it easier).
Get up at 4:30 am and exercise for an hour.
It’s such an obvious cheat code to getting your mental health in order it should be illegal.
I alternate between running and body weight exercises.
Running in cold weather early in the morning feels harder than logging in to my brokerage account. I’d rather stay in my warm bed but somehow this thought doesn’t even cross my mind.
I focus on the pain because I know it’ll be gone once I stop. If I can endure it and delay gratification, I can certainly endure the minor irritation of seeing my portfolio in the red.
On the days I do body weight exercises, the first fifty push-ups are the hardest. I’ll fail if I don’t push through them. No way I’m letting that happen. And then I’m warm, and the workout turns into fun.
Pain is a universal constant. You need to experience it. You don’t know what joy is without pain.
If your portfolio were always in the green, you wouldn’t value your profits. It’s on days when panic selling occurs that you realize how important it is not to be part of the crowd.
Do sports to program yourself to withstand pain. Do them early in the morning because it’s the hardest time of day for your body.
And if you want to check your portfolio after an hour in the cold gushing wind, go ahead. You won’t give a f*ck about the red color smeared across your stocks.
When it’s already down 20%, it’s too late to sell anyway. You must sit out the correction.
And you’re ready to sit it out because your early-morning workouts made you mentally tough.
Do the hard stuff in the morning to look on market crashes as temporary inconveniences.
3. Make a plan before a crash
I’ll never understand why investors dump their stocks in panic in the 21st century.
We have more than a hundred years of historical data showing the market always comes back. Baby Boomers invested for several decades, lived through several bear markets, and became wealthy.
Literally just do what they did. Look at the Dow Jones over the past 100+ years.
And remember, investing was harder. There was no stock analysis 24/7, corporate tax cuts, or quantitative easing, and share buybacks were less common.
The premise for panic selling is “this time is different.”
No, it’s not different. It’s different people reacting in the same way to market uncertainty (and there’s always uncertainty).
So if you feel overwhelmed when your stocks fall, get ready for your next crash.
Sit down at a desk in a quiet room. Close your eyes. Recall the pandemic sell-off in March 2020. Feel your emotions while stepping back to watch yourself.
What would be the most reasonable thing for you to do in a similar situation now?
Write it down. Make it a step-by-step plan. Create this plan while you’re calm.
There will be at least one more crash in your investing life. When it occurs, look up your plan and act on it.
I don’t care if you’ll decide to dump all your stocks or wait for them to come back. What matters is you make this decision with a cool head.
If I believe in a stock, I won’t sell it before a crash. I’ll buy more shares at a discounted price instead.
But if selling is a better option for you, use stop losses. Your broker should have this automated sell order.
Set it before going on vacation or a period when you might not be able to regularly check your portfolio. You’ll be taken out of a position while sipping a pina colada on a warm Mexican beach.
Recap for memory
The longer you invest, the larger your gains. But you need to be resilient to stay in the market.
Use this three-pillar framework to remain calm:
Keep a healthy diet to reduce the number of your negative thoughts
Do sports early in the morning to develop the habit of resisting pain
Simulate a market crash and decide how you’ll act while you’re calm
That’s how you’ll dominate the next market sell-off.
This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.
P.S. Until the next crash comes, you need to hold stocks with growth potential to make the most of the current bull market. If you want to learn which stocks those are, hit the Subscribe button.
I've appreciated several of your comments on Tim Denning's posts, Denis, and thought I'd check out your writing. I'm glad I did.
Thanks for taking the "buy low, sell high" cliché and describing the *how—the part that matters, of course, but fewer people dig into it.
Solid truths to live by!