Got a little voice in your head screaming “sell!?”

So do I. My voice starts as a whisper whenever the stock market starts downward, and it has turned into a shout with other drops as of late.

A lot of people are listening to those voices. That’s why stocks are falling – because investors’ urge to sell is stronger than their urge to buy. All the big U.S. stock indexes plunged in May, and foreign-stocks did even worse.

Does it make sense to pull some or all of your money out of the stock market?

If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you can predict my answer: no.

That’s not based on my assessment of where the markets are heading over the next few months. It’s based on voluminous research by academics and others that shows it’s virtually impossible for small investors to “time” the market – that is, predict when it will change direction from up to down and vice versa.

In fact, few money managers do it consistently, either. There are just too many uncertainties.

Still, it’s nerve wracking to watch your portfolio shrink. Here, then, is my five-step program for handling the stresses that could lead to an unwise move:

¢ Think big picture. It’s not just YOUR stocks and stock mutual funds that are sinking; this is going on all over the world. It’s not as if YOU made some horrible investing decision.

The worldwide pullback is caused by worry about rising interest rates and inflation. Although this is a legitimate concern, these two factors do tend to rise and fall in cycles. That’s normal, and excessive moves in any direction tend to be rectified relatively soon.

The current situation, then, is not at all like the tech-stock bubble of the late ’90s, when overly enthusiastic investors drove share prices to heights that couldn’t be justified on any rational basis. These days, market fundamentals such as corporate profits are quite healthy.

The exception may be stocks in some of the emerging foreign markets, such as in Latin America. Stocks in some emerging markets have more than doubled in the past few years, so a big reversal isn’t surprising.

But if you’ve stuck to the standard advice of having no more than about 5 percent of your portfolio in these stocks, a big downturn won’t hurt very much.

¢ Don’t look. It’s like in those mountain climbing movies where the rescuer tells the victim, “Don’t look down!” Watching your portfolio ebb and flow every day won’t change anything, so just ignore it for a while. That’s what I do.

No portfolio’s perfect. If you follow stocks, you know that every day the paper lists the biggest winners and losers. Unless you have all your money in the one stock or fund that’s doing the best today, you’re leaving money on the table.

What I mean is, there’s always something to kick yourself about if that’s your inclination. It’s better to have a long-term plan, put your money in the investments that suit it and not worry about whether you could have made a few more bucks here and there.

l Remember “reversion to the mean.” That’s a statistician’s term that means things tend to average out. If stocks do exceptionally well for a while, they’re likely to do worse for a while as well.

But over any period of 10 years or longer, there is an excellent chance your stock investments will produce average annual returns of about 10 percent. In fact, stocks have done that over the past decade despite the huge downturn of the early 2000s – one that makes May’s losses look like kid stuff.

¢ Accentuate the positive. If you put money into the stock market every week or month, as many people do with 401(k)s and similar plans, you’re getting bargains compared with what you paid a month ago.

So, considered in the right light, these market downturns don’t look so bad after all.