One morning the broker app hit me with a notification: "your portfolio is down 12% today." And I just could not deal with it. My immediate reaction wasn't to check, or act, or think. It was to put my phone on silent for the entire day and pretend it wasn't happening.
So that's what I did. Eight hours of deliberately not looking. Phone face down, notifications muted, going through my day with this low hum of dread sitting in my chest the whole time. Every quiet moment, my brain circled back to that 12% and spiraled a little more.
I finally opened it in the evening, bracing for the worst. And the reality wasn't nearly as bad as what I'd built up in my head all morning. The number had settled, things had recovered a bit, and it was honestly manageable. Nothing close to the disaster my imagination had spent all day constructing.
But that doesn't erase the eight hours. I still remember that anxiety clearly, the way it hung over an entire day for no real reason. The actual loss faded fast. The memory of spending a whole day quietly panicking over a number I refused to even look at, that stuck.