Over the course of this year we have experienced several significant market sell offs.That makes for big headlines and high blood pressures, but maybe most investors are looking at these market drops entirely the wrong way.

Let me explain. The fact is that the DOW will be where the DOW will be in 10 years. There is nothing we, as investors, can do about it, and in reality the DOW will very likely be higherten years hence than it is today based on current valuations (read: given today’s price to earnings ratio, not to mention the poor broad market performance over the last 10 years, the next decade should be pretty good).

So let’s assume that we have properly aligned our investments with our time horizon – as in, you have reserved your stock investments for capital you don’t need back for five to 10 years or more. If this is the case, then any market declines should be welcomed; your heart should get all aflutter not because of panic due to near-term red on your computer screen, but due to once-in-a-blue-moon profit opportunities.

The point being that great investors are the ones who take advantage of the periodic severe market decline to buy more high quality companies at lower prices (Warren Buffett put tens of billions of dollars into stocks in 2008/2009 and he’s one of the richest people in the world – shouldn’t that tell you something?), whereas the inferior investors use stock declines as an opportunity to sell.

If you can do the nearly impossible, if you can undertake an investing paradigm shift and see rapid near term stock declines for what they are – simply great opportunities to increase future wealth – you would not only reduce your need of blood pressure medicine, but you would likely increase the size of your wallet to boot.

Think back to late-2008/early-2009 when stock prices were getting crushed. The vast majority of investors were depressed. They didn’t even want to look at their brokerage statements. They viewed daily stock prices as though they were witnessing a highway crash they just could not divert their eyes from while driving by. Yet now, a short 12 – 18 months later, those same people who were telling their brokers to ‘sell everything’ are looking back and acknowledging what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity those depressed stock prices were (and in many cases they are buying the very same stocks today at higher prices that they sold at lower prices a year ago).

I recognize it is not easy. Human brains are simply not wired, for whatever reason, to think and behave rationally when it comes to their investments. Nature does a pretty good job of equipping us to survive in other ways, but we are definitely not rational creatures when it comes to money. Only a select few are able to make their fortunes when the proverbial blood is running in the street.

Now that you have lived through one of the worst market meltdowns in history, and have the benefit of calm and rational hindsight to realize that there was – and always will be – money to be made when it looks like the world is ending, the next time the DOW drops a couple thousand points in what seems like a blink of the eye, hopefully you will be able to take that rewired brain of yours and override natural (and destructive) emotional tendencies to take actions that will lead to superior investing returns over time.