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‘I thought: ‘This is for other people’’

“I've always been happy being alone,” says Beth. “I'm really attached to this idea of my own independence. It almost felt like I would have to really grapple with my own identity if I was lonely. So, I denied it. I thought: ‘This is for other people.’

“It felt like a sort of bug. I ignored it for a while. Then I put it to Twitter and asked if anyone else was going through it, and I had these really profound conversations. It turned out that I had been lonely for a while. Nothing had changed in my life. All of the material circumstances were the same. I thought: ‘I can't possibly be lonely.’ But I was.

“It was like a lens had been slipped down over my vision and it was warping things. I would go about my life as normal - I would go on these trips alone, I would be writing at home - but instead of finding this really empowering, I just felt drained. I would go in public, and people would seem hostile. And I felt this yawning distance between my friends. It was so bizarre.”

‘I feel it in the pit of my tummy a little bit’

"It sits there under everything that I do”, says Rachael. “It's weird because I've always felt like I quite like being on my own. But being alone is different to being lonely.

“Loneliness becomes all-consuming. There's a little bit of me that feels really embarrassed that I'm 33 and I'm really lonely. All I've heard for so long is that your 20s are the best years of your life or your 30s are the best years of your life. You're meant to have this amazing time. And I'm sitting here feeling really lonely.”

‘It starts to feel like something shameful’

“There's that reactionary loneliness which can come with a bereavement, with a big move or with a change in circumstance”, says Beth. “But it's when that loneliness endures for longer that it starts to feel like something shameful. You go: ‘There was no trigger for this. This has sprung out of me, and it must be a defect rather than just a human emotion’.

“For me, I had to not make loneliness into an internal monster. I had to understand it. Loneliness is a laying bare of the best of what human humans want, which is connection and to be close and to build together. So, I had to just sit with it and not allow it to become my own enemy.”

‘It’s a daily journey that I’m dealing with’

“I think we're massively missing community everywhere”, says Rachael. “Community fixes so many things. We need it. But also, all of my friends are busy, we work a lot, we're burned out, we're tired, it's the cost-of-living crisis, we’ve not got any money. Loads of us are in flat shares so it's not even like you've got space that you can have people come round.

“I've been trying to meet one of my friends and it's taken us two months because it's been that horrible diary clash. So, it partly can be fixed and helped by people, but ultimately, I think it has to have society changes too.”

• Listen to Beth and Rachael's stories

So, what can we do if we’re dealing with loneliness?

As part of the series, Anita Rani was joined by two women with expertise in this area to share some of the ways that we can alleviate feelings of loneliness. Francesca Specter is a podcast host and author of Alonement, and Claudia Hammond is the presenter of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4’s All in the Mind, who undertook the world’s largest survey on loneliness, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Loneliness Experiment, in 2018.

Here’s some of their advice.

1. Communicate – don’t be afraid to talk about it

“I created this rule for myself if I felt that any experience was isolating, whether that had been a succession of bad dates or whether a week where I felt myself pitching into the abyss and not getting much feedback, I was going to then speak about it to someone who might understand”, says Francesca.

“Whether that was speaking about it on social media, tweeting about it, or even gaining a new friendship... The wonderful thing about that is it helps to treat at least one of the person's loneliness. You share that experience together and it stops being something that's isolating.”

Claudia says that even if you simply chat to a stranger in a shop or as you get on a bus, communicating with others can be useful.
“Even though this is probably not going to lead to some really deep friendships, it starts rebuilding those connections with other people and reminding you that we're all in this together.”

2. Take your mind off it - try to enjoy the alone time

“In the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Loneliness Experiment, we asked people what they thought the best solutions were, and the one that came out at number one in the list was distracting yourself with other activities”, says Claudia. “Find something that really, really absorbs you. Because if that loneliness is fleeting, which sometimes it can be, then being really absorbed in something in your own company and being happy in your own solitude for a while can help.”

“When I'm in that state and I know it's an irrational feeling, thinking: ‘No one would be able to relate to this’, my first port of call is something like journaling”, says Francesca. “It’s quite important for me as a writer. But people have different outlets.

“Some people access therapy for this. For some people, it's another artistic expression or talking to someone very close to them who they know is going to be a good listener. I'm hesitant to use the term self-care, but it is being able to navigate solitude in a comfortable way. It's a building block. It's a foundation, that relationship with yourself, that then you can build outwards to greater connection elsewhere.”

3. Try to cultivate a range of friendships

“Look at what flavour of loneliness you’re feeling”, says Francesca. “Do you feel lonely in your community? Do you feel lonely in your life stage? Are you the only single friend in your friendship group? Are you the only one who's becoming a parent?

“Some people benefit from having broad friendship groups. It might be more difficult to feel that you're understood within your group of friends at different times in your lives. Maybe the solution is making sure that you've got people to support you at every stage of life.

“It’s crucial to have people around you who are going through the same. A lot of my friends are new mothers right now and, rather than be jealous, I actively say that's so wonderful that you spend every Friday night with your new mum friends.”

4. Change your thinking - try to be more positive

“There's really good evidence that people's thinking becomes more negative while they're feeling lonely”, says Claudia. “So, you are likely to then interpret signals from other people more negatively. Take a leap in your thinking to remember to look for the good in every person you meet and remember that most people are nice.

“If you can find some time where you can feel a bit happier with yourself, then the next steppingstone might be having some of these conversations. Then you might realise that we're all in this world and it's hard for all of us sometimes.”

“The thing about loneliness is that it's quite hard to identify once you're in it. It's quite demotivating. It's quite isolating,” says Francesca. “Try to identify and forgive yourself for any moments where you feel lonely and use it as a jumping off point for where you're going to find solutions.

“If you come from a perspective, like I do, where you think that alone time is a failure, a weekend where you spend a couple of nights in by yourself is a failure or even being single is a failure, that’s a belief that you need to begin to challenge. I wanted to find aspirational examples of people doing things solo, looking at accounts of people who solo travel. Normalising that for yourself, not as a curable solution, but as something that can be balanced and positive.”

5. Be kind to yourself

“It's very normal, particularly in transitions, to feel lonely - if people have just moved somewhere new or you just had a baby or just retired, or somebody has just died”, says Claudia.

“Be kind to yourself by not beating yourself up for feeling bad about feeling lonely. Don't think: ‘Oh, I can go out tomorrow, I'll do all these things and then it will all be fine’, and then beat yourself up some more if it isn’t. You need to take it step-by-step and be kind to yourself as you do it.”

You can listen to the full interview with Beth and Rachael on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Sounds - it’s the episode from 31 July. Plus, you can listen back to our entire series on loneliness here.

Join the conversation on and @bbcwomanshour.