The Risk Worth Taking: Why True Friendship Requires Vulnerability & How To Build Community As An Adult (Episode #40)

🔗 Book your FREE Hormone Clarity Call HERE 

Most of us know we need community. Far fewer of us have it — really have it. 

In this episode, Jess gets personal about the power of community — from what it felt like to have friends show up for her during surgery recovery to past friendships that ended, and the quiet loneliness that can exist even when you're surrounded by people. 

She digs into the science of why true human connection is one of the most powerful determinants of health and longevity, why developing and maintaining adult friendship is genuinely hard, and why vulnerability — despite the risk — is worth it.

 In this episode, Jess discusses:

• Why loneliness is a public health crisis — and why it has nothing to do with how many people are in your life
• What the Harvard Study of Adult Development revealed as the single strongest predictor of health and happiness
• The physiological reality of connection — why community literally regulates your nervous system
• Why the season of young kids and full lives can quietly erodes even the best friendships
• The vulnerability problem (and irony)
• 5 practical ways to build and protect your community as an adult

If you've ever felt lonely, struggled to make and maintain real friendships as an adult, or held back because you've been hurt before — this one is for you.

Connect with Jess:

• Instagram: @vitalbalancewithjess 
• Website: jessicatrone.com
• Email: vitalbalancewithjess@gmail.com

DISCLAIMER: The content shared in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only, is not a substitute for the advice of medical doctors or practitioners and should not be used to prevent, diagnose, or treat any condition. Consult with a physician prior to beginning any fitness, health, or wellness regimen or routine.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to Vital Balance with Jess, the podcast for women who want real life strategy, no BS conversations about women's health. I'm your host, Jess. While building my career as an attorney, I struggled with hormone imbalances, anxiety, metabolic dysfunction, and a healthcare system that left me with more questions than answers. So I took matters into my own hands. And here's what I discovered. The real magic happens when you get curious, start asking questions, and listening to your body like it actually knows what it's doing. This podcast isn't about weight loss, physical appearance, or rigid wellness routines. It's about agency. I want you to know just how much control you have over your everyday well-being. And I want you to experience stable energy, predictable moods, a sharp yet calm mind, and a body you can trust. Because when women are well, our homes and communities thrive too. Let's get started. Welcome to Vital Balance. I'm Jess. Today I want to talk about something that's been on my mind for a while, and that's typically what I do with this podcast: discuss things related to health and wellness that have been on my mind or heart, or just feel important to address for various reasons. Right now, that topic for me is community and friendship. I've thought a lot about it because I was just blown away by the support of my community and friends when I underwent ACL surgery almost five weeks ago. I had meals delivered to my house almost every night for about three weeks. I had friends checking in on me via text. Multiple friends brought me breakfast or lunch and just sat with me and chatted for an hour or two since I was immobile and couldn't really leave the house. I had people send me get well cards in the mail. Numerous people offered to drive my kids around and take me to physical therapy. The gratitude I felt for my community that I feel for my community is immense. And honestly, I wanted to cry happy tears several times because friendship isn't always something that has felt easy to me, especially before I moved to the town where my husband and I have lived for the past six and a half years. Prior to that, I've had seasons where I looked around and realized the friendships I thought were solid really weren't. I've been let down by people I trusted deeply, and I think those experiences left me more guarded and more hesitant to let new people in. And that hurt and disappointment shapes how willing we are to be vulnerable with the next person. Community and friendship are extremely important for our health, and that's not just based on anecdotal evidence, but it's also a complicated topic because we are living in a time when a fairly large percentage of people don't have a strong community. They don't have many people they can truly rely on. And unfortunately, as a society, we are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. So today I want to talk about community, what it actually does for our health, and the research on this is really understated. I'm also going to discuss why it is so hard to build and maintain friendships as an adult, especially when you have a family with young kids. There's also that very real fear of vulnerability that keeps so many women from forming the deep friendships they actually want. And lastly, I'll discuss how to be more intentional about building and protecting a community that will truly sustain you. Before we talk about what community gives us, I want to address what the absence of it does because I think it reframes the whole conversation. Loneliness is a public health crisis. In 2023, the US Surgeon General cited research showing rates of loneliness had been climbing for decades, and that the health consequences are severe. Chronic loneliness has been shown to have effects on the body comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes every day. Believe it or not, chronic loneliness can elevate cortisol, disrupt sleep, suppress immune function, increase inflammation, raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, and cognitive decline. And here's an important distinction to make: loneliness is not just about being alone, it's about feeling disconnected. So you can have a spouse or be surrounded by colleagues and neighbors and acquaintances and still feel lonely. Because loneliness is the absence of genuine connection, not the absence of people. And I think a lot of women are living that reality. On the other side of that coin, here is what strong community does for our health. It is one of the most robust predictors of longevity we have, supported by research. The Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies on human happiness and health ever conducted, because it spanned over 80 years, found that the quality of relationships was the single strongest predictor of both happiness and physical health in later life. Not wealth, not status, not even genetics, but relationships, the quality of relationships. Strong community buffers against the physical and mental effects of stress. It gives us a sense of belonging and meaning, which ties back to the perma model I discussed in episode 36 on happiness. We were not designed to do life alone. We are literally wired for connection. Co-regulation, the way our nervous systems calm each other through proximity and attunement, is a real physiological phenomenon. The right people in the right moments can bring us back to the present, releasing worry, anxiety, and rumination in ways that nothing else quite can. Those friends who brought meals to my door, they were regulating my nervous system without perhaps either of us knowing it. So now I want to dive into an important issue when it comes to developing and fostering community. I can sit here and cite research for you and tell you why it's important, but I suspect some of you might be thinking, okay, yeah, that's great, but how do I form a strong community? And why does making strong, authentic friendships feel so difficult? Well, I think there are several reasons for this, but I want to discuss two of them in particular. Number one, season of life plays a big role, especially the season of raising young children. Maintaining strong friendships when you have young children is genuinely difficult. Not because the desire isn't there, but oftentimes because the time and energy aren't. When your kids are infants and toddlers, you often feel like you're in survival mode, barely having enough energy to raise your kids, let alone spend much time with other humans. I've been there, I remember that season of life very clearly. My youngest is only five. Friendships in this season require intentionality. You have to schedule things, you have to follow through even when you're tired, and you have to be willing to show up even when lounging on the couch sounds better. I think a lot of friendships quietly fade in this season, not because anyone stopped caring, but because nobody had the bandwidth to keep showing up. And then enough time passes that the distance feels kind of awkward, and so the friendship never quite recovers. And look, this isn't because you or your friends are doing anything wrong. I mean, it it really is just somewhat inevitable. I think it's a season of life where we have to give ourselves a lot of grace. There will be a time when you will have the time for more than just keeping your kids alive. And it's okay to be and feel more distant from other people, but don't let it become your norm once you know that you have the capacity to prioritize friendships again. And then number two, the vulnerability problem. Here's the thing about friendship that people don't really talk about or perhaps even acknowledge internally. True friendship requires vulnerability, real vulnerability, expressing your fears, failures, the ways your life doesn't match the version of it you present to the world. And for women especially, that can be kind of terrifying because we live in a culture of comparison. We worry about people not accepting us for who we truly are, that they won't like us, or perhaps we worry that if we share something vulnerable, that it will get told to others, that a confidence will be broken, or that it might be used against us somehow. Or maybe we just don't want to spend the time and energy really opening up to someone because we've been burned before. We've lost friendships for various reasons, and expending the time and energy to really get to know someone might not be worth it in the end. I have those stories, those experiences. And I'll be honest, they have made me more guarded, more selective, more likely to keep things surface level until I've done my due diligence on whether someone is actually safe to trust. And this is self-protective and understandable, and also, if I'm not careful, a barrier to the very connection I'm craving. The cruel irony of being burned in friendship is that the wound makes it harder to build the thing that would help you heal. You need connection to recover from the pain of disconnection, but the pain of disconnection makes connection feel risky. And so we just tend to stay isolated, a little guarded, and then we wonder why we feel lonely. Which leads me to the topic of friendship loss, something I think most of us have experienced at least once, if not multiple times. And this can happen for many reasons. Whether it's a drifting apart, whether someone betrayed us, or maybe someone pulled away and we never really knew why. I've been through this more than once. Like I said, I have struggled with friendship through various stages of my life. And I want to share a few things I've learned from those experiences because I think they're directly relevant to why vulnerability in new friendships feels so difficult. First, you can love someone and still grow apart. People change, values shift, life takes you in different directions. Or maybe you're in totally different seasons of life and you feel like you can't relate to the person who used to be your closest confidant. The end of a friendship doesn't always mean someone did something wrong. Sometimes two people who were genuinely right for each other in one season simply aren't in another. And it's really painful, but we don't have to view it as a betrayal. Because if we don't view it as a betrayal, it will make us less hesitant to open up to other friends in the future. Second, closure is often a myth. I spent a long time waiting for conversations that never happened, for explanations that would make everything make sense. And I've had to make peace with the fact that sometimes you don't get that. Sometimes you don't get the ending that you think you need. You do just have to move on and not let that experience dictate your ability to be close to other people. Number three, forgiveness doesn't always mean reconciliation. You can forgive someone for your own sake, for your own peace, because it's the right thing to do without inviting them back into your life. Forgiveness is internal work. Reconciliation is a separate decision and it requires trust that may no longer exist. Number four, it is okay to grieve a friendship the way you would grieve a breakup. The loss of a close friend can be just as destabilizing as the end of a romantic relationship, sometimes even more. And yet our culture often doesn't recognize that type of grief. Give yourself permission to grieve and sit with those emotions. And finally, some people are in our lives for a season, and that is still sacred, right? We needed that person for a specific reason at a certain period of time in our life. And if they don't remain our friend indefinitely, that doesn't mean the friendship wasn't worth having or that it didn't provide immense benefit to our life. A friendship that ends doesn't become retroactively meaningless. What it gave you, what you learned, who you became, that remains. Okay, so let's move on to the how. How do we build a community? I broke this down into five steps. Number one, community doesn't look the same for everyone. Figure out what it looks like for you. We are all different. Some of us are extreme introverts, while others crave human connection on a daily or maybe even hourly basis. So this means some of us may have a small community of a couple people, and that's okay. As long as the connections with those few people are meaningful and we truly feel a sense of connection. Some of us might want a community of people who have shared interests and very similar values, while others might be okay with a more diverse community. The point is that it will look different for everyone, and it should. We just have to recognize what a true meaningful community looks like for us. Number two, identify and invest in your core people. Not all friendships are equal, and they don't have to be. You don't need dozens of close friends. Research suggests that most people have a capacity for three to five genuinely close relationships. People who know you deeply, who can call you in a crisis, who would drop things to help you, and you for them. Start by identifying who those people already are in your life. Who has shown up for you? Who do you most feel like yourself with? Who do you trust with the parts of yourself you don't show everyone? Those are your people, and they deserve intentional investment. Schedule time with them, protect it, follow through even when life is full. The friendships that survive the season of young kids and busy careers are the ones that someone chose to keep showing up for. Number three, be willing to go first, to put yourself out there. One of the biggest barriers to new friendships as an adult is that everyone is waiting for someone else to initiate. Everyone is a little afraid of rejection. Everyone is wondering whether the other person actually wants to be friends with you. Someone has to go first and it might as well be you. Reach out to the person you've been meaning to reach out to. Suggest a specific plan rather than the vague, we should get together sometime, because that typically doesn't materialize. Be the one who follows up, be the one who makes the effort. Most people are deeply grateful when someone else takes the initiative because they wanted to and just didn't. Number four, embrace vulnerability. This is something we've already discussed throughout this episode. I'm not suggesting you immediately discuss your deepest wounds at the beginning of every new friendship. Vulnerability has to be earned and reciprocal, but I am suggesting that you resist the temptation to keep every new friendship permanently surface level out of self-protection. The friendships that become genuinely meaningful are the ones where both people were willing to be a little more honest than was strictly comfortable, where someone said something real and the other person responded accordingly. Those moments of mutual vulnerability are where actual connection happens, because without them you just have pleasant company. Number five, give grace to others and to yourself. People are going to let you down. Not always maliciously, though. Often just because they're human and fallible and dealing with their own struggles. The question is whether you let every disappointment become evidence that trust is dangerous or whether you extend grace and stay open. That doesn't mean tolerating toxic relationships, but it does mean not letting the worst experiences define your entire posture toward friendship. And give yourself grace too. You're gonna be imperfect at this. You're gonna be the one who cancels sometimes or who doesn't show up the way you intended. That doesn't make you a bad friend, it makes you a human. The goal isn't perfect friendship, it's faithful and authentic friendship. Showing up imperfectly but consistently over time. Community is not a luxury. It really is a biological and spiritual need, and the research is unambiguous about what the absence of it cost us physically, mentally, and emotionally. I am so grateful for the people who showed up for me this past month. It has reminded me in the most tangible way possible what community is actually for. Not just for the good times, though that's wonderful, of course, but for the hard times, for the seasons when you can't do it alone. To everyone in my community who showed up for me, thank you. It means more to me than you know. I hope you have people like that in your life. And if you don't yet, I hope this episode has given you something very important to consider and a good place to start. Being vulnerable isn't easy, but when done with discernment, it is more often than not worth it. Because the most valuable things in life don't come easy, and intuitively we know that. We just have to make a conscious effort to accept difficult challenges, and doing that in the name of community is a worthwhile endeavor. Thank you so much for being here. Until next time.

SPEAKER_00 19:11

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave my mommy a five-star review. And don't forget to hit the subscribe button.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Thanks so much for tuning in to Vital Balance with Jess. If you loved this episode, it would mean the world if you would leave a review, share it with a friend, or hit subscribe so you never miss a dose of real talk on women's health. Remember, you have more control over your health than you've been told, and sustainable change is possible. Keep listening to your body and showing up for yourself. I'll see you next time.