A standard piece of advice for investors during a major selloff in the stock market is to hang in there and not panic.

That is frequently misinterpreted to read, close your eyes and pretend that what’s happening in your portfolio isn’t happening.

Today, as stocks tempt a bear market and numerous bond strategies are also showing high-single-digit losses, the impulse to bury your head in the sand may be understandable.

To be sure, you don’t want to react in knee-jerk fashion to both the pullback in stocks or declines in your bond funds, but it’s also a good moment to get down under the hood of your portfolio and figure out how your plan compares to what you were expecting and whether you’re still on track to reach your goals.

Where to start? Marta Norton, chief investment officer for the Americas at Investment Management, has these eight steps for investors to keep in mind as we endure these rocky markets:

1. How Robust Is Your Portfolio?

One of the things that we really think a lot about is robustness. This is similar to diversification, but not exactly the same. It’s thinking about your portfolio, and the various conditions you can be in: high economic growth, low growth, high inflation, and low inflation.

If your whole portfolio is dependent on high growth and low inflation, then you don’t have a robust portfolio.

Or perhaps you’re purchasing something that is workishly inexpensive but would otherwise thrive in a certain habitat. “Imagine that you don’t know how the market, the economy, all of that is going to play out. You can make a best guess about it, and it might be right or it might be wrong at other times.

So it’s natural to think about those various ranges of environments and your portfolio — even within a single asset class. Even in equities, you could say to yourself, “Which of these sectors will do well in which environment?”

For example, if we go into a recession, finances are not very good to be in. If a recession is avoided and rates remain considerably high, then there’s some measure of tailwind for financials. If we have a recession, perhaps energy doesn’t perform as well. But if you have inflation, maybe energy does well.

So you have all those different considerations for different areas of the market and you need to work that out.

2. Look for Buying Opportunities

As Warren Buffett says, to be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.

Generally speaking, when you care about the price that you’re paying for things and the market is being sold off quite hard, not just a modest decline here or there, but definitely a hard selloff then all else being equal, that is a buying opportunity.

With respect to stocks, at least to the degree that a company’s underlying assets remain unencumbered, you have healthy companies, healthy debt. So now that prices are much improved, that is a good thing in terms of long-term returns.

Whenever we're starting to see a market selloff like this, we're always gonna start getting interested and thinking about how to take advantage of the opportunity, rather than just being a victim of it.

I believe this is a story that people widely sympathize with, but whether or not they act that way is another matter.

3. Buy the Dip vs. Having a Plan

This is a far cry from the mantra or hashtag that seems to permeate everywhere that says “buy the dip.” There’s almost this trampoline kind of thing, like this market is going to fall hard, and it’s going to be this immediate kind of bounceback. It’s something of an instant gratification thing.

And I want to warn that if it is a significant selloff, there can be more significant selloffs.

When we start to get interested in a market selloff, we don’t put everything we could in the market and do it immediately. We do this in a much more dollar-cost-averaging fashion, in which we modify and create a buying plan. If the market’s down X amount, I’ll do this; the market’s down X plus this amount, I’ll do that.

It’s a precommitment that can help you thwart a behavioral bias, because, the more the market sells off, the more you start to wonder: What does the market see that I don’t? So having this type of precommitment in this type of environment can be a really strong motivator to do the right thing, even though it feels really bad.

4. Don’t Buy Through the Rearview Mirror

Not all down markets look alike, and not all up markets look alike.

Stocks that the market has loved are not going to be loved anymore and so, you know, necessarily you don’t want to assume that this is just a dip and then you get right back in and it’s going to be the same way it was before.

5. Check Your Expectations

This is not (yet) a recession, and this is not a global financial crisis. This is a change in the market environment, it means we are going from a benign inflation environment to an inflation environment, with an accommodative monetary policy to a less accommodative monetary policy.

And, to the degree that it has been that accommodative policy and that economic environment that has underpinned security prices, then you are facing potentially the next 10 years that are less friendly for returns than the last 10 years. It is important to recalibrate expectations.

6. Bonds Still Have Value

It’s pretty hard when your bonds are losing meaningful amounts of money right alongside your stocks. I’m not sure that we fully expected it, even though you knew that when rates started to rise, bonds were going to sell off.

But as you watch equities sell off, and then you watch bonds sell off, it’s just very difficult to comprehend what the value of a multi-asset portfolio is.

From our perspective, there is still value in bonds. If we had a case of a recession, then there's potentially a safe haven where Treasuries would fit in so they still have kind of a role in that type of environment.

At some point, as bonds are selling off, they’re not going to keep falling, at the same time. So perhaps you view bonds not as a part of your portfolio that’s generating returns. But they’re still not falling in every case to the same extent as stocks. And as they’re selling off and their yields start to rise, they become more attractive.

7. Think About Looking Beyond Stocks and Bonds

Good to know this type of market environment the concept that bonds and stocks can go down at the same time is on the table in the realm of the possible. “We haven’t seen it in so long I just think people were caught off guard.”

So the other thing I would think about, stocks and bonds don't just have to be those two things that you own. I’m not referring to commodities or real estate. I’m referring to alternatives in the hedge-fund-y sense of non-leveraged strategies with smoother return profiles. They provide balance for your portfolio without the threat that some segments of fixed-income markets do.

The secret sauce is you want more-agreeable, steady performance that’s not being driven by the same undercurrents that are driving fixed income that aren’t being driven by the same undercurrents that are driving equities.

8. You Don’t Have to Be Right

In order to have a portfolio that can fulfill a financial goal at the end of your time horizon, you don’t need to be able to predict that economy. You do not need to be a savant. And you do have to be humble enough to say, ‘I could be wrong about this. What could I own, that is reasonably priced, that could offset that concern?’”