The Psychology of Your 20s podcast host on her own crisis

Jemma Sbeg still doesn’t understand how her self-help podcast became one of the biggest in the world.

She recalls her first meeting with Spotify after her show, The Psychology of Your 20s, suddenly blew up: “This is incredibly rare. This is really bizarre, and we don’t have an explanation,” the streaming giant’s Australian reps told her.

In 2024, three years after she independently launched her show, Sbeg signed with former US Spotify podcast boss Max Cutler’s new media company PAVE Studios and will release her first book in April. Titled Person in Progress, the self-help book is receiving a global release, published by Penguin Random House in the US and by Hachette in Australia and Britain.

This success was built on the back of millions of young people around the world turning to Sbeg for answers in times of crisis. Heartbreak, loneliness, and mental health are among the topics covered in Sbeg’s science-backed guide to navigating your 20s.

But when we first met for lunch at Newtown’s Soulmate in July 2024, Sbeg had no idea that she was on the precipice of a crisis of her own.

A very different profile of Sbeg’s meteoric rise was written and ready to print on the back of that interview when Jemma dropped an episode of her podcast that changed the story.

“I had a mental breakdown” was the episode’s title. After listening, I knew I had to re-interview Jemma.

We meet again, and this time Sbeg invites me to her home, also in Newtown. Her cute terrace house is Sbeg personified, warm and inviting, full of cute and colourful knickknacks and overflowing with books. I offer to bring food to share, but she insists on picking up a selection of her favourite baklava from a local bakery.

‘This is incredibly rare. This is really bizarre, and we really don’t have an explanation.’

What Spotify representatives told Jemma of her podcast’s success in their first meeting

My first formal question to Jemma is to ask how she is. She responds that she is now “well medicated”, describing her wellbeing as a five out of 10.

“I would spend my whole life at a five out of 10, and I’m totally okay. That means that nothing that bad is happening.”

Sbeg, 24, grew up in Melbourne, where she was raised by two high-flying parents. Her mother is Melinda Cilento, the chief executive of the prominent think tank, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (better known as CEDA). Her dad, Bart, who primarily stayed home to care for Jemma and her two sisters in their youth, runs a not-for-profit called Dr Cranky’s that provides bikes to disadvantaged children.

I knew of Sbeg before the podcast. We both studied at the Australian National University in Canberra and crossed paths while working at the student newspaper, Woroni, but had never properly met. And, yet, both our conversations felt like reconnecting with an old friend. She’s bubbly and personable, with the trustworthy energy of a stranger you meet at a house party and end up drunkenly revealing your deepest secrets to.

She launched her podcast as a psychology student in the depths of the pandemic in 2021, inspired by a personal heartbreak and a knack for helping her friends understand their experiences.

A career in consulting post-uni was put on hold when the success of the show meant Sbeg suddenly had the means to pursue her passion project full-time.

Her mum was concerned when she announced her intention to quit her job to concentrate on the podcast, but Jemma’s dad was fully on board. “Who cares! Go for it,” she recalls was his response.

After years of strong growth, The Psychology of Your 20s had a breakout year. She landed on Spotify’s 2023 end-of-year global top podcast list, placing the show within the top 25 in the world. The only Australian podcast featured on the list, Sbeg sat alongside household names like Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, Dax Shepherd and Jordan Peterson. Soon after, she signed the deal for her first book.

It’s a pair of remarkable feats when you consider that Jemma launched the podcast independently, with no public profile, from the back seat of her car parked outside her university share house in Canberra.

Each episode of The Psychology of Your 20s is structured around a single topic, with the vast majority featuring only Sbeg’s calming voice in extended monologues as she unpacks that week’s concept with academic research and studies, weaving her own experiences throughout.

The risk of misinforming the masses on something as important as mental health is a responsibility Sbeg takes very seriously; no matter the topic, she ensures her content isn’t opinion-based. “That’s harmful, especially now that the platform is bigger.

“I have a script. Here are my studies. Here are my concepts. This has been researched. This has been really thought about, I’ve talked about this with people,” she says of her approach. The show still sits in Spotify’s top 10 in the health and fitness category in Australia, the UK and the US.

In my original story, I noted Sbeg’s frankness and how I checked with her multiple times through our lunch that the details she disclosed were on the record, to which she happily responded that it was all fair game.

Her willingness to be similarly open with her audience might explain why the podcast connected. There are plenty of podcasts about science and psychology and perhaps even more that give life and dating advice based on personal experience, but not many that effectively draw the two together.

Detailing her own mental health crisis, however, was easily the most personal she’d ever been with her audience.

“I basically had a mental breakdown. There it is; I said it out loud,” she says at the start of the episode. “Many of you are probably going through this as well, and when you’re in it, you feel so completely, entirely alone.”

Sbeg’s specific experience was related to severe death anxiety. In the episode, she explains the debilitating experience of being immobilised by an intense fear of the death of her loved ones and herself.

At the depth of her crisis, Sbeg couldn’t stop crying for days and barely ate or slept. She spent a week essentially bed-bound with panic.

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The decision to share something “so inherently vulnerable” wasn’t a given. She explains that after an internal debate that continued until the morning she posted the episode, she ultimately decided that if she was willing to speak about breakups, grief, and her physical health, her mental health should be no different.

“The big hurdle I found with talking about mental health very explicitly, not just saying ‘I have mental health struggles’ but saying ‘I had a full mental breakdown, prolonged depressive episode, massive anxiety’ is that you do still recognise the stigma that is attached,” she tells her audience.

I ask Jemma what she would say to those who criticise Gen Z for its propensity to “overshare”. On this point, Sbeg is resolute: “It’s oversharing until it’s something that you need to hear,” she says.

Young people have witnessed how harmful bottling up mental health issues has been for their parents and their grandparents, she counters. “Let’s be completely utilitarian; the cost of not sharing is just immensely higher than the cost of sharing. And the cost is borne by me.”

And there was a more important principle at stake. She felt she had the perfect platform to be honest about her struggle and that if someone with a Gen Z mental health podcast wasn’t willing to lay bare the whole truth, then who would be? “It almost felt like a disservice to pretend everything was fine,” she said.

The response, Sbeg says, was “insane”, both in terms of listenership and feedback from fans who said they’s had similar experiences. “You would never want anyone else to go through it. But when you know that they are, it’s instantly comforting.”

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Weeks after the episode was posted, Sbeg estimates she still receives up to 10 messages a day from people thanking her for sharing her experience, with the episode attracting about twice as many listeners as the next most popular episodes from the same period.

The episode details how hard it was for Sbeg to get professional help during her breakdown, an experience that shocked her, given her knowledge and experience working in the industry.

“It was impossible. I remember being like, ‘all I need right now is to see a psychiatrist who can change my medication’.”

But she couldn’t get an appointment for months because no one was willing to escalate her case.

One crisis hotline worker asked Sbeg if she had “watched any scary movies recently” that might have triggered her distress.

“No wonder our suicide rate is so high,” she says bluntly. “If you are going through the same system as I was going through, and you don’t have support, you’re going to feel completely hopeless.”

After surviving the most difficult experience of her life, Sbeg hasn’t slowed down. Her book, Person in Progress, will be released next month. It’s a five-part self-help book split into sections on the so-called “quarter-life crisis” (20-somethings version of a midlife crisis), love, career, loneliness and mental health.

And Sbeg has launched a brand-new podcast, Mantra, where she explores “what it means to embrace growth while navigating life’s twists and turns by applying a new mantra each week”.

The podcast is the second project from the wellness branch of PAVE Studios, and Sbeg is in famous company; the first podcast announced was Khloé Kardashian’s Khloé in Wonderland.

As she continues to expand her work, she has no plans to alter her open approach. “The takeaway is that every time I have been … vulnerable online, it has always worked out in my favour, and it has worked out in the favour of others,” she says.

Person in Progress: A Roadmap to the Psychology of Your 20s will be published by Hachette Australia on April 29.

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