The past few weeks had many stock investors wondering whether the wild market swings created more risk than they could bear.

But this volatility shouldn’t affect long-term investors—after all, we calculate the value of a company based on five-year or longer forecasts of profits and cash flows. However, severe short-term losses can be disconcerting and cause many investors to panic and lock in losses just to see the stock price bounce back after the sale.

Behavioral finance tells us that we can become better investors if we understand our own personalities and have a plan ready when disaster strikes. So here are some ideas that may help you focus on the long-term merits of equity investments during times of market mayhem.

1. A long-term perspective removes the short-term noise.

Equities move up over time. Between 1927 and 2014, U.S. equities provided an annual return of 9.8% per year. This was considerably better than any of the other major asset classes, including bonds and cash. Few investors have an 87-year time horizon for their investments, but the graph below of the S&P 500 going back to 1965 serves as a proxy to show the difference in the volatility experienced by the short-term focused investor (the weekly graph) compared to the volatility experienced by the long-term investor (five-year moving average). The message is clear: If your focus is long term, short-term volatility shouldn’t worry you.

2. Equity investments hold little risk for long-term investors.

Equities are often considered  a risky asset class, unsuitable for risk-averse or retired investors. Critics will point to the dramatic declines in U.S. and other global equity markets between September 2007 and March 2009, when the S&P 500 lost more than 50% of its value.

Nevertheless, for investors who kept their nerve at the time, the total loss in the U.S. market was recovered within four years, with the current value of the S&P 500 three times higher than at the market bottom and 30% higher than at the pre-crash peak. The numbers in the table show that equities hold little risk for long-term investors. It is only traders and those with short investment horizons that need to fear market volatility.

For investments into U.S. dividend-paying stocks with holding periods longer than five years, the risk of capital loss is less than 10%; for holding periods longer than 10 years, it’s less than 5% and zero for holding periods over 15 years.

For shorter holding periods, less than a year, the risk of loss dramatically increases up to 40%. Remember that these statistics relate to a well-diversified portfolio, not to individual stocks.

The great Warren Buffett, in his most recent annual letter to investors, declared that the low-risk investment option is equities: “The unconventional, but inescapable, conclusion to be drawn from the past fifty years is that it has been far safer to invest in a diversified collection of American businesses than to invest in securities—Treasuries, for example—whose values have been tied to the American currency. That was also true in the preceding half-century, a period including the Great Depression and two world wars. Investors should heed this history. To one degree or another it is almost certain to be repeated during the next century.”

3. Accept we can’t predict the future.

During a briefing in November 2008 by academics at the London School of Economics on the turmoil of international markets, the Queen asked: “Why did nobody notice it?” She was told by a professor that “At every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing.”

Of course, that’s just a fancy way of passing the buck. The truth is we can’t predict the future with any consistency.

Even some bright minds that warned of the imminent dangers of a market collapse in 2007 and 2008 such as Nasim Taleb, David Rosenberg and John Mauldin, continued to hold bearish views long after the markets turned upwards and missed the better part of one of the most profitable bull markets in history.

Humility and distrust of common wisdom  are useful allies when investing hard-earned money in the public markets.

The best that we can do is to assess the risks and rewards of each investment, and make sure that we do not get carried away by market sentiment or overconfidence.