Money managers aren't rescuing people from burning buildings, but their profession comes with plenty of anxiety nonetheless. Investing in the stock market is pretty much a zero-sum game: You're either winning or losing. More stress-inducing is the market's volatility — in the morning you're up a few million and by lunchtime you could be out that and more. Investors feeling whipped by the market's oscillations could find some serenity in Dr. Ari Kiev's counsel. Kiev is a psychiatrist and coach who works with professional money managers, including some hedge-fund managers whom he declined to name, to help them overcome the emotional hurdles associated with daily trading.

In his latest book, "Mastering Trading Stress," Kiev relies on case studies and conversations with traders he's worked with to illustrate, for example, "misapplied meditation and visualization techniques," and the difference between confidence and arrogance and how that can affect your trading.

Though it sounds a little touchy-feely, one of Kiev's pieces of advice is to embrace the anxiety and discomfort associated with uncertainty. In order to do that, he recommends some clients to record in a journal their emotional responses (panic) to market events (gold-mining stocks are tanking). That allows traders to, you guessed it, get in touch with their feelings. Breaking down overwhelming and complicated thoughts into their concrete parts makes them more manageable. Experienced and successful traders, Kiev says, learn to stand outside of their reactions and work hard to get control over their stress.

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"Under stress, you're much more suggestible and easily influenced by extraneous factors," says Kiev, who has worked with professional athletes like former NBA players Isaiah Thomas and Kevin McHale, the U.S. Olympic bobsled team in the '80s and several figure skaters.

SmartMoney.com: Why did you focus on stress in this book?

Ari Kiev: In each book I've written I've had a little bit about stress, but I decided it was a good idea to do a book completely focused on stress. Much of trading success has to do with mastering stress, the psychological ability to function in the face of stress, and to recognize how you may be maladapting, how you may be trading inefficiently, making mistakes because of stress. You need to learn to recognize when your behavior is so influenced by stress that you're doing things for psychological reasons rather than for strategic investing or trading reasons.

[I give] examples of how people respond, misinterpret events or overreact to their own psychological responses. How they, in the face of their own stress, begin to go into default modes when they react like a deer in headlights. The more experienced traders, over time, learn to recognize their own responses, to detach their trading from their emotionality. Not that they stop feeling stress; they just don't trade in terms of their feelings.

SM: What are some of the most common mistakes traders make?

AK: The most common mistakes people make as a result of stress are to fail to recognize that something that's happening to a stock may be due to a real change in the stock or to the impact of the market. And so they bought a stock at $20, it dropped down to $17, and instead of analyzing the situation and saying the market is bad, this could get worse and paring down the position, they rationalize the position. "I loved it at $20, so I love it even more at $17."

They hold it or buy more. They say Warren Buffett looks for cheap stocks. They find rationalizations to stay in it. The more experienced guy says the market is telling me something. The smart thing to do is cut my losses, wait until the market turns, and get back into it at that point if the story is still a good one. The panicked person thinks you'll lose the upturn. It's more difficult to get back losses than to make money.

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