IT’S BEEN AN UNHAPPY few months. Stepping outside means risking our health. One out of six U.S. workers is unemployed or soon will be. The stock market has suffered its worst decline since 2007-09. And while we can take steps to help ourselves, the situation is largely out of our control.
Feeling glum? One of my abiding interests is happiness research, and that research offers ideas that can make our current situation a little cheerier.

DUTCH DISEASE. SOUND like something that might devastate your garden? In truth, it’s an economic term coined in by The Economist magazine in 1977—and it refers to the economic fallout that followed the 1959 discovery in the Netherlands of Europe’s largest natural gas field.
The natural resource was initially a great boon to the economy, causing the value of the Dutch currency—then the guilder—to rise sharply in the foreign exchange market. All good?

WORKING ON A TRADING floor has its perks—or, at least, it did back when we were all in the office, instead of toiling away from home. The trading floor where I work is small, but it still houses perhaps 50 people.
As you’d expect, we have TVs all around, tuned to CNBC, Bloomberg and—my personal favorite—The Weather Channel. My colleagues often talk stocks and portfolios. What’s neat is you get a good sense of investor sentiment being out on the floor and among finance folks who are geared to day-to-day market movements.

HOW MANY TIMES have you found yourself doing things you don’t want to be doing? It might be binge-watching Netflix, eating junk food or mindlessly scrolling through your favorite app. This is something we all struggle with.
Investing is no different. The behaviors we should avoid are mostly clear, but it isn’t always easy to follow through.
I remember vividly the day I joined my first employer, Chicago-based investment researcher Morningstar, as an intern a few years ago.

IT’S OFTEN SAID investors are driven by fear and greed. But I’d add a third item to the list: regret.
The past year and a half have been enough of a rollercoaster to rattle even the most even-keeled investor, creating ample opportunity for regret. Since the fall of 2018, the stock market has dropped 20%, gained 30%, dropped 35% and then gained 30% again. Result? Here are some of the sentiments I’ve been hearing over the past month:

“Why didn’t I sell at the top?”
“Why didn’t I buy at the bottom?”
“Why did I bother with international stocks?”
“Why did I buy high-yield bonds?”
“For the love of God,

IT’S 4:45 A.M. AND another day quarantined at home. Even though I have nowhere to go, I still get up early. It’s one of my favorite times of the day. This is when I go downstairs to the kitchen, make myself a cup of tea, toast some raisin bread and read about what’s happening in the world.
Later, Rachel and I will go for a walk and then have breakfast together. This is how we now lead our lives—sequestered in the house—away from friends and family.

MY PARENTS AND grandparents were forever affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s. They shunned debt, paid cash for everything, never invested in stocks and kept their modest savings in the bank, mostly in a checking account.
Following the 2008-09 Great Recession, many Americans also changed their financial ways, at least temporarily. We increased our savings rate immediately after the recession. But a few years later, we returned to our high spending ways.

ARE YOU WORTH IT? According to many sellers, you are—even if they have no idea who you are.
Economics generally divides consumed goods into necessities and luxuries. But behavioral economists understand that we need luxuries, at least psychologically. Purchasing things for ourselves is a way to self-validate, to say we are more than our base needs.
Who hasn’t felt good about an accomplishment and used that as a reason to splurge,

WHEN I WAS IN GRADE school, I remember a field trip to a highflying local company called Prime Computer. At the time—it was the 1980s—Prime was a Fortune 500 company with a popular line of minicomputers and a runaway stock. Today, Prime is long gone and barely remembered. A Wikipedia page is about all that remains.
For a long time, I didn’t understand this. How could a company so successful simply cease to exist?

ON APRIL 14, 1988, Captain Paul Rinn was the commanding officer of the USS Samuel B. Roberts when it struck a mine in the Persian Gulf. The resulting explosion tore a 21-foot hole in the side of the frigate. Almost immediately, the ship began taking on water and multiple fires broke out.
Naval protocol for this situation was clear: Put out the fires first, then worry about patching the hull. But after just a few minutes of firefighting,

WHEN ASKED, MOST people say their most valuable financial asset is their home. But what gave them the financial wherewithal to buy that house, as well as to purchase a car, buy food and pay for vacations? It was their career. Everything that has a financial component in our life starts with our earnings potential.
Take a young adult making $60,000 a year. Assuming a 2% annual raise, he or she would haul in nearly $3 million over a 35-year career.

ONE OF MY FATHER’S favorite sayings was, “This too shall pass.” Recent events have made me dwell on its meaning—and wonder where the phrase came from.
It seems to have originated as a Persian adage. It was employed in a speech by Abraham Lincoln before he became the 16th president: “It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations.

THE CORONAVIRUS IS prompting people to behave irrationally. They’re hoarding food, toilet paper and other goods. They’re risking their health—and that of those they know—by failing to limit their physical contact with others.
This irrationality has spilled over into the stock market. More than 30% of the U.S. market’s total value has been wiped out. It’s hard to argue that this is justified. The businesses represented by these stocks may be hit with short-term disruptions and a temporary reduction in profits.

WHEN I WENT TO THE grocery store last week, it was packed with customers stocking up on essentials. Carts were filled with items that people couldn’t possibly consume in any reasonable period of time. It’s a scene that’s been repeated across the country.
A friend told me: “When people panic, they want things right away. When people see other people panic, they panic, too.” Like the coronavirus, fear is highly contagious.
I’m not panicking,

WHILE JIM AND I cooked dinner the other night, we talked about the old cars we drove when we were younger—and how they tended to pull to one side if we took our hands off the steering wheel. We humans have a similar tendency: We head in one direction unless we make a conscious effort to be more rational.
That brings me to the coronavirus and accompanying stock market plunge. We all have gut reactions to news like this.