You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. We've lost so much in so many different ways during this global pandemic. What it leaves is an extreme feeling of exhaustion, stress, and uncertainty. But today we have thoughtful antidotes.

Relationship therapist and podcast host Esther P, sits down with Ted's head of

curation, Helen Walters, to help us make sense of our profound stress and offers some ways

to get through it.

I especially love the part about anti-small talk.

She'll explain.

Hi, Esther Perel. Thank you so much for joining us. And I want to get right to it. So we're more than a year into this pandemic now. And I think one constant,

whether we're really acknowledging it or not, has been heightened stress levels, shall we say.

So I'm sure you've seen this in your practice and in

your work and I'm curious. What are you recommending to people who are coming to you that are

wanting to know how to regulate stress effectively? So hello, Ellen. Here it is. We're living in a time

of existential anguish, of isolation, of universal grief,

economic insecurity, prolonged uncertainty.

And we have a tendency to call all these feelings stress.

But stress is multidimensional.

Researchers Susan David and Elisa Apple emphasize the importance of having to break it down into parts so that they become manageable.

We have despair, we have anxiety, exhaustion, sadness, anger, irritability.

All these feelings are part of stress. And when they are named

and framed, we can better regulate them and deal with them. Prolonged uncertainty at this moment

is that notion that we are uncertain, but we also don't know how long this will last. This is

not your typical disaster

where you have a warning and a planning and an onslaught and a post. We are in it and we don't know

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