  We consider risk averse investors with different levels of anxiety about
asset price drawdowns. The latter is defined as the distance of the current
price away from its best performance since inception. These drawdowns can
increase either continuously or by jumps, and will contribute towards the
investor's overall impatience when breaching the investor's private tolerance
level. We investigate the unusual reactions of investors when aiming to sell an
asset under such adverse market conditions. Mathematically, we study the
optimal stopping of the utility of an asset sale with a random discounting that
captures the investor's overall impatience. The random discounting is given by
the cumulative amount of time spent by the drawdowns in an undesirable high
region, fine tuned by the investor's personal tolerance and anxiety about
drawdowns. We prove that in addition to the traditional take-profit sales, the
real-life employed stop-loss orders and trailing stops may become part of the
optimal selling strategy, depending on different personal characteristics. This
paper thus provides insights on the effect of anxiety and its distinction with
traditional risk aversion on decision making.
