This is NPR's Life Kit, I'm Mary El Segara.

So the other day, I made the mistake of looking at my investment account.

I put some money in there last year and my stocks were down.

Way down.

And this is what a lot of people are going through right now.

About 60% of Americans have some money in the stock market,

and the markets are not doing great.

Big indices like the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000 are at 52-week lows,

and the Dow just fell into what experts would call a bear market.

It's like, every time you think stocks have hit rock bottom, there they go again.

And I mean, what do you do in this moment, right?

Because the instinct can be number one, to sell everything.

And number two, to never put money in the stock market again.

But our knee jerk reactions aren't always the best thing for us.

So on today's episode, we talked to an expert about how to think about investing in this moment.

And how to manage the emotions that come up.

I want to share a little bit of a life kit episode that NPR's Chris Arnold hosted in 2019.

It was a broad overview of investing.

And Chris had a really clever way of talking about exactly this kind of moment we're facing.

There's a metaphor. It's funny.

And the person you'll hear him talking to is David Swenson,

who at the time was Yale's Chief Investment Officer.

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