Imagine each person in your life as a publicly traded security.

You’re heavily invested in a few: your parents, your partner, your manager. You hold small positions in many others, like coworkers, acquaintances, friends of friends. And then there are people you have no stake in at all. Strangers on the street, commenters online, passing critics.

Ideally, the influence someone has over your self-worth should be proportional to your level of emotional investment in them. When your mom compliments your hair, it feels great. When a guy on the street insults your shirt, it shouldn’t register any more than a stock you don’t own crashing.

But most of us don’t run our emotional portfolios so rationally.

We overreact to noise in the market. We let people we barely know move our valuation. And sometimes we stay over-exposed to assets that no longer belong in the portfolio: ex-friends, old bosses, estranged relatives. They still hold emotional equity they haven’t earned in years. Cut your losses. Rebalance.

There’s also what you might think of as market sentiment. You might not care about one person’s opinion, but when you start to see the same reaction from many people, it begins to feel like the whole market is shifting. That’s useful information — trends matter — but it’s easy to mistake short-term volatility for a long-term correction. We tend to overestimate broad trends from local noise. If you want to calibrate to reality, it helps to get an independent assessment — from a manager, a friend, or a therapist — someone with a wider view of your “market”.

The term investment is deliberate. It isn’t just how much you care, it’s how much you show that you care. Attention, time, empathy — those are your capital. The returns you get, good or bad, depend on where you put them.

Manage your emotional economy like any other portfolio: diversify wisely, invest intentionally, and don’t panic when the market dips.