Instant Genius - Why connecting with others is vital for our mental health

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Statistics show that half of us will experience a mental health condition of some kind by the time we turn forty. Could this be due to the increasing pressures and looming crises we’re currently facing in the modern world, overstimulating natural responses in our brains and bodies that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to protect us from threats? In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Joanna Cheek, a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and clinical professor based at the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine, to talk about her latest book, It’s Not You, It’s the World – A Mental Health Survival Guide for Us All. She tells us how the system of alarm signals in our brains is being increasingly triggered by the rapidly changing circumstances we find ourselves in, how this is hijacking the push and pull of our natural risk/reward systems, and why connecting more deeply with the rich tapestry of the people and cultures we share the world with can help us all bring our lives back into balance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, Commissioning editor, a BBC Science Focus. Statistics show that half of us will experience a mental health condition of some kind by the time we turn 40. Could this be due to the increasing pressures and looming crises we're currently facing in the modern world, overstimulating natural responses in our brains and bodies that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to protect us from threats? In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Joanna Cheek, a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and clinical

professor based at the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Medicine to talk about her latest book. It's not you, it's the world, a mental health survival guide for us all. She tells us how the system of alarm signals in our brains is being increasingly triggered by the rapidly changing circumstances we find ourselves in, how this is hijacking the push and pull of our natural risk reward systems, and why connecting more deeply with the rich tapestry of people and cultures we share the world with can help us all bring our lives back into balance. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks. Excited to be here. So today we're talking about your latest book. It's not new. It's the world. A mental health

survival guide for us all. So in the book you say that currently something like half of us will suffer from a mental health issue before we're 40. So that's a huge proportion of people. So before we get into the sort of meat of things, what are some of these common mental health issues that so many of us are facing? So there's a variety of mental health conditions that we can all face. The most common would be anxiety and depressive disorders. And in this book, I don't speak specifically to any one mental health condition, but I speak to how it's actually a large variety of conditions and presentations and expressions because there's a large variety of stressors. and adaptations and our body can kind of adapt in many different ways. So one of the models that really helped me understand this was I was lucky enough to train at the University of British Columbia

in psychiatry with J-9 Austin, who was a professor there. And it was also the research chair in Canada for psychiatric genetics. And J-9 developed this jar model to illustrate the complex interplay of what makes us sick and what makes us well again. So J-9 started by describing this jar that we have and that each of us begins with our jar full with a certain amount of balls at birth. And these balls represent the variety of genetics that we each inherit from our parents. And so there isn't one gene for the vast majority of mental health conditions, that instead it's multiple genes that each have a small effect that will all make us slightly more vulnerable to mental health conditions. Even these genetics are

environmentally adapted to our ancestors' environments. And so we each start with a jar that has a certain amount of balls in it that is our kind of risk at birth. And then our jars fill up with many exposures to stress in our environment over time, such as exposures to racism or inequities like financial stress, growing up in poverty, poor access to health care, stable housing, violence, isolation, conflict, bullying, pollution. Recently we're seeing infections like COVID and so on. And then as the jar begins filling with a significant amount of environmental stress, we experience mental health symptoms. And so in this book, I really like to differentiate between symptoms themselves, which might be worrying more, feeling a lot of anxiety in the body, low mood,

noticing more anger, shame arising. These are all helpful alarms that warn us that are jars filling. So we can learn to notice these signals and use their messages to identify and solve the problems that they detect. So in this way, these alarms bring our systems back to balance. But when our jar continues to overflow with too many stressors, which I think we're seeing so much right now at these huge levels of numbers in our populations, and it only takes looking at the news to really understand why our jars are overflowing so much, then the overwhelmed system can no longer write itself back into balance on its own. So we experience mental health symptoms, distressing and disabling enough to be diagnosed as a mental health disorder. To return our system,

to the health of balance. We can remove some of the stresses from the jar when possible, or we can increase the height of the jar. Jane and Austin teaches with a wide variety of strategies, such as mental health therapy and skills, medication, physical activity and diet, meditation, spiritual practices. And in my book, I particularly talk a lot about the importance of connection with others, meaningful engagement and belonging to our wider web of life,

and activities that can actually bring our collective back. into health are predominantly helpful. So we mix and match from this long list of possible strategies to bring our systems back to balance. And also, the most importantly is we need to look at the root of the problem, which is the escalating imbalances in our wider system that keeps filling our jars up with stress in the first place. So we really need to care for our collective for all of us living in this world and the ecosystems and look at how do we prevent our jars from filling up so much in the first place by collective care. That's all of the things that we'll be getting into in a bit more detail later on. But first off, you mentioned there this idea of alarms and alarm

signals in this system that you explain in the book. So what do you mean by that? Could you explain that for us, please? I see in the book that these mental health symptoms, kind of when the jar isn't full yet, they aren't the primary problem because they started off as signals and adaptations to help us see and then solve the problems in our environments that are making us sick. So I like to see mental health symptoms as canary in the coal mine. They alert us to dangers and imbalances in our wider systems. And this might be problems in our social worlds, our wider communities, countries. We're seeing now our geopolitical relations, our ecosystems. So the distress itself isn't a problem. It alerts us to problems. And it's really kind of noticing now that we can't be healthy by only trying to silence these

alarms and feel better in a sick world, we actually need to listen to them to solve the problems and make a better world through actions that fix these problems that keep making us sick. So what are some specific examples of these alarms? So I base this book on systems theory, where the first rule of systems theory is that we're all interconnected. And the second, which I haven't touched about yet, is that diversity matters. And the more diverse we are, the more resilient the system is. But the third is that all systems are flexible and they need to be regulated by feedback loops that sense disruptions in the system and then bring it back into balance. And these alarms often feel bad because they're supposed to.

Shame, anger, sadness, fear, low mood. It's meant to get our attention because they have essential functions to keep us healthy. So it's kind of obvious when we think of fear that it makes sense that it's alerting us to potential threats and it'll help us keep ourselves safe. But grief, shame, resentment, envy, even low mood, these are all helpful if we learn to understand what their messages are. So our smoke alarm is this caneering the coal marn. It's kind of set to have many false alarms and our brain has this motto, it's better to be safe than sorry so we don't miss any fires. So we might notice we have these alarms and then still need to decide is there actually a fire in front of us, or is it more like our bagel is burning in the toaster

right now? So even though these alarms are coming on, it doesn't mean that there's automatically a threat in front of us, but they give us that little warning so that we can pause and reflect and then decide what actions are necessary. So one of the ones that we often don't think about is helpful as shame. And shame is something I've been marinating in years for because these alarms do become hypersensitized. So they become more sensitive based on our past environments if we've needed them before. And shame, for example, I used to teach was kind of the screw up of the family that we wish it could just act like as more perfect sibling guilt who was polite and accountable and cleaned up after its messes. And the guilt alarm is a wonderful signal. I think some of the problems we're seeing in

society is people's guilt alarms aren't strong enough right now because they aren't acknowledging that, oops, we did an action that isn't helpful or is harmful, and it pushes us to acknowledge that harm and repair the situation. But shame, it sends this short warning that I am bad, and it urges us to hide the perceived flaw within ourselves. So we often teach our caregivers when I offer raising resilient kids workshops to kind of discipline their children with, I love you, so they're not the problem, but not this behavior. So we're encouraging guilt instead of shame, and therefore accountability and self-compassion. But guilt doesn't beat out shame in all situations. Sometimes we must hide even the most beautiful parts of ourselves. So when we sense the threat of

being shunned by others if we're to fully show ourselves, our survival instincts push us to hide the parts of ourselves that may be rejected. The distress signal pushes us to find a safer community or hide these parts if we're stuck needing to appease groups that would reject this part of us. So for me, for example, I'm queer. And so I know when I enter certain communities, if I have a sense that they might be homophobic, my shame alarm might go off. And the shame alarm is telling me, I'm not sure if I can trust these people with this part of me. It's not saying that I actually am bad. That part's a shortcut. It's just telling me maybe how this part, assess the situation. So I often like to teach both people I work with as clients or patients or also my students to listen to that shame alarm.

It's often telling us that the environment, the people we're with aren't psychologically safe or they might be at risk of rejecting us or shunning us if we were to show all these gorgeous parts of ourselves. And so it's just taking that moment to reflect. That being said, there's also false alarms. So because I've had shame in the past, I need to recess. you know, is this really true right now or is it actually telling me more about the experiences of my past environments? On the back of that, even one of the chapters in the book is called self-care is collective care. So that's a really interesting idea. So, you know, can you unpick that for us, please? So to me, health is balanced systems, as I mentioned before.

And we can think about from indigenous ways of knowing Buddhism and other spiritual traditions or the science. of medicine, ecology, even quantum physics, that all of these different ways of knowing, understand our world through the lens of this interconnected systems theory we inhabit. So because as humans, we can't exist isolated from other parts of the many systems we're entangled within. So we can think of our body as something we traditionally define as me, but it's not a closed system, even though we have skin. It's an open system that's constantly communicating through invisible links to its environment.

And the same is true for our nations, that there is no us versus them, and that we're all intimately connected. So self-care can't only focus on what's held within the boundaries of our bodies. To help ourselves, we must care for the collective, because we have our own self, but we also have a collective self. And so an injury to anyone part of our system is an injury to ourselves, just like we can think in the body, a cell from the liver needs the health of the cells from the brain or the heart to keep the whole body alive. And we know, know that in the past three billion years of evolution, our ecosystems learned how to best organize themselves to develop sustainably and maintain balance. And it's only been as humans

really define these rules that's messed everything up. But it's not simply the rival of humans to the scene that derailed this natural order. In my home in North America, indigenous communities lived in balance with the ecosystems for over 20,000 years. And the pathology itself is a specific mindset. It's ruled by the cancerous dynamics of domination, division, indifference, kind of this divide and conquer mindset, where humans fail to understand their interdependence with the very systems they keep destroying. I think we often call it kind of the delusion of separation or this market individualism. And so when one of us in this interconnected system, whether it's humans or certain groups of humans, dominate over the others, is just like a cancer cell.

dominating over the body. Our body systems, our social systems, our geopolitical systems, our ecosystems, in any of these dynamics when that happens, the entire system can spiral out of balance. And so we know that just as this exquisite harmony of the trillions of cells that come together to function as our bodies can be defeated by a few cancer cells who fail to share and fail to care for the environment, all the other systems we inhabit are equally vulnerable to the same disease process. And it's this cancerous winner-takes-all mentality of the dynamics of dominance in our social systems. And there is a huge fallacy to this competitive brand of individualism. It's really where we exert power over others and we win. Everyone's still losing

because we're dominating over and defeating our actual systems that we need to survive. And so for this reason, we can't just focus on ourselves. We can't just focus on individual anti-aging systems, you know, self-care alone. We also need to look at how do we keep the balance of our collective? Because if we're not focusing on that, no one can be healthy. And there's a lot of research in particular that I'm focused on around inequities. And a lot of it's actually come out of the UK that there is a huge amount of reviews and studies to show that the more inequities and the more inequality in a country in a system leads to poor health and everyone. And in fact, it's much more important than any individual health behaviors.

It's also the leading cause of violence. And so often when we have an individual who is having a physical illness, a mental health condition, or is violent in any way, we often blame the individual and we're not looking at the systems around them. And in fact, the inequity that we live in leads to much more health problems and shorten life expectancy than any other factor. And we can see this in the U.S. who has the worst health outcomes compared to any other high-income country because they also have the highest level of inequities. Bonjour, compadre. It's the Priceline negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget.

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something that you've personally experienced. And I adventure lots of people listening have, and that's burnout. and the idea of the sort of grind culture where working long hours, you know, at the expense of not only your physical health, but your mental health, it's often seen as a badge of honor in some of these circles. You know, so how much damage is that doing to us? Yes. And I like to think of this jar model, again, that so often our jars are being full of too much stress all the time. And so this is where when I talk about healthy systems and balance, we also can't go too far in the opposite direction. Yes, I really feel that we need to care for our collective and we need to care for ourselves.

And so the key to this idea of systems theory is that we can't get out of balance in either direction. So we need collective care to keep ourselves healthy. And sometimes we need self-care a lot of the time to also keep our collective healthy. So if we're constantly focusing on serving others and repressing our own motions and not listening to these signals, then we're at risk of our jars filling without even noticing because part of that burnout is that we override these signals and we're not listening to exhaustion. We're not listening to stress, to anxiety, to low mood. And so our jar is filling without us even noticing it. And there's such a culture these days of how are you busy as a status symbol and that so much of the. this kind of leads back to our unregulated capitalistic systems where our worth is dependent on

our productivity. And that's often related to how much money we're making. And we're not really looking at the impact on us. And instead, if we could change our values away from this need to produce and to make money that our cultures are so often really based on, instead, if we can look at the abundance of health that we could have through connection, through time, through wellness, and change that lens. I think that's a culture change that really needs to happen because otherwise all our jars are going to keep getting full. And one of the signals that's really important to me to listen to is the low mood signal. And the low mood signal tells us that there's low rewards compared to the risks of the world. And I think a lot of us are

feeling low mood right now. And so if you can think of us fishing and we're out there catching lots of fish, we're going to feel really motivated and excited. And that's going to keep us out there to keep fishing. And as the fish start to dwindle, so we're getting less rewards. So for example, perhaps we might be working all the time and not focusing on our relationships and things that provide more sense of connection and meaning in life. Or we're just exhausted. Once those rewards start to dwindle, our low mood comes up. And that low mood is telling us to go back to our caves and go cuddle under the covers or try to go find a different lake where there might be more fish. So often when we find that low mood alarm going off, it might be coming out as burnout. We just want to kind of get rid of

the feeling instead of listening to the problem that is trying to signal to us. The problem is saying there's not enough rewards right now. And I can feel that when I, right now I'm promoting my book. And I'm not having enough fun in many ways. So that low mood is wanting me to nap and go back to bed and just kind of, I feel the blas. And that is a sign that this burnout is happening. And so it's telling me that I need more rewards. I need to help with that balance that at this time, there's too much work and not enough

rewards. And so instead of just trying to treat that feeling itself, we need to actually listen to what imbalances is it telling me about. And this can be problematic because often going back to collective care, we aren't in control of this balance. And you look at people living, especially within systemic inequities, living in poverty, having to have three jobs just to feed your children, all of these things, constant stress of maybe they're in bullying or really high conflict relationships. Sometimes we do feel stuck. And so it is a signal that's there. and sometimes it takes the rest of our collective to fix the world

so that people aren't stuck powerless in systems that is out of their control to change. So from a sort of personal perspective, perhaps then, say if someone is finding themselves in one of these uncomfortable, unpleasant situations, and they're really struggling to cope, there are a number of things, a number of techniques that we can at least attempt to use,

to help, as you say, re-address this balance. So can you talk us through some of those that you talk about, please? Definitely. And one of the things in this book that I explore is that there's no one right or easy strategy for everyone. And one of the challenges I see in mental health is that I think sometimes we want to sell an easy fix. And the truth is there isn't an easy fix and there definitely isn't a silver bullet that will work for everybody. and that there's so many different stresses that can lead to our jars being full, and it can present in so many different ways that even though we have a box of burnout or a box of anxiety or depressive disorder, it doesn't mean we've all gotten there in the same way. And so that does mean that we all need a variety of treatments.

So my book actually is almost 300 pages offering a variety from a lot of different styles of therapy, but also a lot of different spiritual traditions, cultural groups, different ways of different ways of different. being that are outside of Western medicine science and psychotherapy also. So I can talk about what might help me, but it's wonderful to also recognize that we each require our own pass to healing. And I kind of hope my book is a bit of a smorgasbord where we can mix and match different things and just see how much is out there. And definitely there's more than I could even write about because it would take forever. And so when I'm noticing, for example, for myself, that there's burnout or low mood, I first look at that balance of the rewards versus threats and see if there's

something that I can rebalance in that way. Some of the things that can be really helpful is to look at our actual threat networks. When I'm talking about the threats, we actually have these three subcortical networks. The first is around rage. And so that's when there's threats to our agency or threats to justice. The second is separation distress. when there's threats to our connection or belonging with others. And the third is when there's threats to our safety or a lack of certainty or predictability in the world. And so I like to think, you know, often when I have patients come to my office and especially with low mood, you know, really trying to figure out what area is the most predominant.

And I'm always quite surprised, especially when it progresses to depression or depressive disorder. That so often it's separation distress that we're feeling disdiscuous. connected from others. And there's a whole style of therapy called interpersonal therapy that I teach and talk about in the book, which is really showing that simply strategies to help improve our relationships, to notice role transitions that impact our social relationships, to work around grief and any conflict, that can really improve this sense of separation distress, which thus can improve our depressive symptoms. But also a lot of the time, as I was mentioning, might be, that we need to work on that agency system? Is there something that can provide a sense of agency? So I was saying I was

quite burnt out this month and my partner and I had did a basket weaving course on Valentine's for eight hours, which I'd never done before. And I was so amazed the power of making an basket. It sounds so small. And at the same time, that sense of doing something, a small task that can create a sense of agency. This is where a lot of anything that feels a sense of mastery or you've done something, even doing the dishes or kind of giving yourself when there's so much sense of powerless. And then the third, with safety, is often we need a sense of routine to get us back into it, a sense of predictability. And so adding structure to our days, there's a lot of research, in particular with mood disorders, that when we eat our meals at the same time, wake up at the

same time, socialize or go to work at the same time, that can really help us. And I used to work at the University of Victoria Student Health. And those universities days are really disrupting for people because the schedules and routines are so off. So even though the world feels exceptionally unpredictable, we can still add some predictability through our routines. Even though it might feel like the world is very virtual and disconnected and in conflict, we can focus on a few people to connect to. And there's a lot of research that shows our connections in particular, that our connections in particular really impact our health. And then that sense of agency and justice. And this leads to bigger things. How do we kind of use these to improve our health of our

collective? And what we need is more agency and justice. We need more of a sense of coming together and belonging and we need more of a sense of safety for everyone and a sense that there's norms and a lot of discussion around the rules-based order is over or has it ever been there in the first place. But are there norms around ethics and justice and how we treat each other both internationally and in her own smaller communities. Yeah, so all fascinating stuff. Another thing that really stuck out to me in the book was the nation of kind of self-criticism,

I suppose you'd call it. And it's like there's the popular subreddit, you know, Am I the Asshole? When somebody's done something, they either think maybe they are, they probably do. But they want to ask people anyway. And I think we've all probably done some, well, more than one thing that we've required.

and thought afterwards, oh, why unearthed, did I do that? You know, you go through all different sorts of things you sure have done instead, et cetera, et cetera. So what can we say about that? You know, what kind of effect is that having on us? Definitely. And a huge area, I work as a mindfulness teacher and a huge area of research that is so exciting.

And I'd say it's probably the most positive area of research in all of mental health is around self-compassion. And this does stem back from mindfulness and Vipasna. Buddhism in many ways and other spiritual traditions, I would say, around the world. And Kristen Neff is someone who's really explored this. And Kristen Neff looked at this concept of self-esteem that I think, especially in Western psychology, we've really focused on both in schools and workplaces, especially in psychology, that how do we improve our self-esteem? And what we realized is, no matter how many interventions we tried, nothing was working. And we realized that we couldn't improve

people's self-esteem. And in fact, self-esteem tend to be related, actually, the more we tried to focus on it, it would kind of connect more to somewhat narcissistic behaviors of trying to be better than everyone else and almost bullying others as a way of helping with that comparison. And in fact, self-esteem goes back to those old dynamics I was talking about earlier of kind of more competition and dominance and how do I compare in comparison to others. How can I be better? when in fact, going back to this collective care and how can we instead focus on working on the same team, self-compassion is about, yes, I'm flawed just like everyone else, and really taking solace and knowing that me too, you know, I make mistakes, everyone makes mistakes. And it's not about being better than others or comparing ourselves to others, but actually really taking relief in the fact that we're part of a collective where we all mess up. And so often I really spend a lot of time in this book, and this is the whole idea of the systems theory, is that it's not us individuals that are the problem.

It's that we all have been living in the imbalance systems around us that are making us sick. And so when we have behaviors that are unhelpful, it might be because our ancestors. So, for example, if you look into the distance as our ancestors and they were like, oh, is that a lion or is that just a rock? It was actually those that were really focused on the danger and could be like, I think that's a lion. And so they were the ones that survive. The ones that were super chill and calm, I like, oh, don't wear as a rock. Let's just keep dancing. They weren't really the ones that through natural selection were selected to survive.

And so those of us with kind of the most neurosis, I use that word very affectionately because I'm high. highly neurotic myself, but those of us who are the most anxious, the most insecure about our relationships, they're the ones who survived the most these threats. And so those genetics have been selected to help us survive. So we often say in evolutionary psychology that we've evolved to survive, not to be happy or calm. And so we are all more anxious and insecure at times. And that's wonderful. And then we go through our lives learning from our environments. And the more hostile or unsafe our environments are, the more you've experienced people being rejected and you're seeing the device of politics we're seeing and how critical and rejecting it is,

we're taking in messages from that. The more we're raised within cultures that value us based on how much we can produce versus how caring or loving we are. We're taking that in, so we're socialized to act in certain ways and we're learning from our environments. And then we also have this trigger-happy fight-flight-free system that's pushing us into stress responses all the time. And a big part of my book, I have a chapter on how quickly we can be hijacked our brains that this prefrontal cortex part of our brain, which is the part that is able to give us the wonderful skills of compassion, empathy, understanding other people's perspectives, even seeing other people's perspectives, long-term thinking and problem-solving reflection. That's in our prefrontal cortex. That

part of our brain becomes deactivated with stress. So if we are experiencing really high levels of stress, we end up not having access to those really important functions and more in this fight, flight phrase or survival instincts, more of the emotional parts of our brain that are really quick and dirty. They might not perceive things. They might not hear other people's perspectives. They definitely aren't very good at teamwork or empathy or compassion. And it looks pretty ugly. And then once we become regulated again, we regret that we just sense off that mean text message or that we acted that way. And we can be really hard on ourselves. And so we have all of these factors, both genetically we're predisposed to being more anxious.

And then we're socialized in certain ways with the culture around us that might not be helpful or healthy. And then we have these stress responses that deactivate the more helpful parts of our brain in terms of vast responses. So it's no, you know, every one of us is messy all the time. I mean, I've canceled Christmas when I'm mad at my kids, only to take it back half an hour later, because it's just like you're so dysregulated. And then also, dysregulation is contagious. So if my kids are really disregulated and I'm having a bad day and just got home from work and I don't have many resources myself, I might quickly get dysregulated myself. And so you can see how it's a bit of a domino effect. And I think we're seeing that in the public square right now, especially in North America with the politics and I think around the world that the more dysregulated our collective becomes, the more stressful it is for everyone.

And the more stressful it is for everyone, the more dysregulated we all get. And then we spiral all out of control into dysregulation and disease. And so if we can kind of see this not as our fault, but that a lot of this is really our brains trying their best. to survive a dangerous environment. And the key is to notice when it's happening and be accountable to it. I think so often we want to blame others or we feel shame and it's not our fault.

But instead, if we can have a culture of connection and belonging where it's okay to make mistakes, where we all understand that our brains do this all the time, where we all understand, even those of us who say racist things, there's a lot of writing around anti-racism

that we've all sadly internalized these beliefs and these actions and urges from generations of being indoctrinated by racism. And so instead of trying to pretend that we aren't and that racism doesn't exist, being like, yes, I've been socialized this way. And thank you for the gift of telling me so. And I want to change and I acknowledge it. And it's only through seeing when we've gone astray or made mistakes and being accountable. Can we then have the opportunity to change?

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Joanna Cheek. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book. It's not you, it's the world. A mental health survival guide for us all. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now.

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