You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh.

I read a funny tweet the other day about anxiety. It said something like,

anxiety is so powerful it can cosplay like 10 different mental illnesses. Give me the range she has.

Obviously, that's presented in a cheeky way. But anxiety does exist in so many forms, in so many different contexts.

Social psychologist Valerie Purdy Greenaway breaks down one nagging context for anxiety in her conversation with Ted's curator Chloe Shasha Brooks from our new TED series, How to Deal with Difficult Feelings.

Hello, Valerie.

Thank you for being here.

One of the things I've been excited to ask you about is just, you know, you talk about how

there's two ways of seeing anxiety, right?

Chronic anxiety and context-based anxiety.

So can you define the two for us?

There's two ways of thinking about anxiety. I think the first way that people traditionally think about anxiety is chronic anxiety.

We are still in the midst of a pandemic. People are anxious. Some others might think of anxiety in terms of their personality,

you know, their micromanagers. And these kinds of anxieties are sort of everyday anxieties

that are with us for a long period of time. What I study is another kind of anxiety that

other people may not be aware of.

And this is the anxiety that comes from being part of a social group,

whether it's your race, your ethnicity, your gender, your sexual orientation, your size,

and walking around the world and sort of bumping up to environments where you're stereotyped, where you're other-rised, and that context makes you feel different. And in that moment, you can feel it's the same

biological kind of anxiety and stress, but it comes from the context. So I study the kind of stress, anxiety,

frustration that stems from being a member of a group that can be stereotyped, and I study the

kinds of context that make that happen, whether it's at work, at school, you know, at church,

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