I am human.

Thirty years in markets and more downturns than I can count have not made me immune to fear, doubt, or that uncomfortable feeling when things start falling apart. If anything, the experience has made one thing clear: I don’t need more insight, I need protection from myself.

A few years ago, I was on a family road trip when my car suddenly went into “limp mode.” Power dropped, speed was limited, and the whole experience was frustrating. I was annoyed. It felt like the car had let me down.

But that was not the case.

“Limp mode” is there for a reason. When the system detects a problem, it deliberately restricts performance to prevent something small from becoming something catastrophic. It sacrifices short-term convenience to protect long-term function.

It is protection, not failure.

Now compare that to how we operate as humans, especially in markets. When stress hits, we do not slow down, we speed up.

We do not get a warning light telling us: “Your judgement is compromised.” We do not automatically shift into a safer mode. Instead, we feel urgency. We feel the need to act.

And that is the problem. Your brain is an incredible system, but it is old.

It was built for survival in a very different world. For a world of immediate threats, not long-term probabilities. When uncertainty rises, it defaults to what it knows best: Focus on danger, act quickly and reduce risk now.

That worked when the threat was physical.

It does not work when the “threat” is a volatile market. Under stress, your thinking narrows. You stop seeing the full picture. You overweight what just happened and project it forward with confidence. A bad week starts to feel like a bad year. A correction feels like something permanent.

And here is the part that makes it worse …. you are not alone. Everyone else is feeling the same thing at the same time. The noise grows louder. Acting feels justified and almost responsible.

But history tells a different story. This is exactly when people make their worst decisions. Not because markets are broken, but because our decision-making is.

There is no upgrade coming for your brain. You cannot rewire thousands of years of conditioning in the middle of a crisis, but you can work around it.

The only real solution is to accept how this system works and build something around it. You need a structure that slows you down. A process that creates space between a feeling and action.

When you slow things down, something important happens:

• You move from reaction to intention.
• From impulse to judgement.
• From short-term survival thinking to long-term alignment.

This is where your version of “limp mode” comes in. You need a pre-committed decision framework. Something you put in place when things are calm so that it protects you when they are not. It does not eliminate emotion, and it will not make you perfectly rational.

Its purpose is to introduce friction and to force a pause. It creates enough distance for better thinking to re-enter the process. Most importantly, it helps you stay aligned with what you said you wanted before things became uncomfortable.

The uncomfortable truth is this: The biggest risk to your long-term outcomes is not the market, but the decisions you make when the market is under pressure. Time and again, the damage is not caused by volatility itself, but by what people do in response to it. They change plans, abandon strategy and act at exactly the wrong time.

Not because they do not know better, but because in the moment their feelings take over. As Seth Godin puts it: “Feelings have a huge evolutionary head start on facts.”

The goal is not to become emotionless. The goal is to be prepared. It is to accept that, at some point, you will feel uncertainty. You will feel the urge to act.

And when that moment comes, you will not rely on willpower. You will rely on structure, a system and a process. A “limp mode.”

In investing, as in driving, survival of the system matters more than speed of the moment.

 

Written by Marius Kilian

 

Source

* “Recency Bias (or: You’re Running Buggy Software)”, Mark Crothers, humbledollar.com, 7 Apr 2026