This is TED Health. I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. Have you ever felt like an outsider?

That everyone else belongs except you? If so, you're definitely not alone. In this episode of TED Health, social psychologist Valerie Purdy Greenaway helps us unpack where this feeling comes from and explains why it

causes so much stress. From her May 2021 interview for Ted's had a deal with difficult feeling series,

she explains what to do the next time you're in an anxiety-provoking situation and find yourself

thinking, is it me? Hello, Valerie. Thank you for being here.

One of the things I've been excited to ask you about is just 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

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