How to deal with loneliness? Annie Grace answers.

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Loneliness is a tough one. I think so often when we feel lonely we are looking for someone else or something else to come and pick us up or connect with us. Especially when we feel lonely we often feel down on ourselves or maybe that we don't deserve to have connections or companionship. We don't necessarily have the desire to go after them ourselves we sometimes think that some of these things will just get fixed and we feel victimized by being lonely. We feel like loneliness has happened to us and we're so alone in this and we can't really pick ourselves out of it.

There's a few things that I think are really helpful. When I had graduated from college
I took in my college town - all of my friends moved away, a hundred percent of them - so I was left in this town with this job that I was really excited about but all my friends had left and there I was by myself in this town completely totally alone. I remember leaving the office and just feeling this crippling loneliness.

I had read something somewhere “You need to give what you are seeking to get.” So if
you want love in your life you become loving you know if you want people to do things for you, you start to do things for other people. I decided to go and take a shot at volunteering. The most profound thing that I did is I signed up for at a homeless shelter
and so 2 to 3 nights a week I would go to this homeless shelter and for 3 to 4 hours I would check people in who needed a place to stay. It was phenomenal the change that happened in my life because of this a few things number one when you are checking people into a homeless shelter you cannot help but feeling grateful for the fact that
yeah maybe I don't have any friends and there is loneliness there but I have a roof over my head, I have a job, I have the ability to go to the grocery store and buy my food.

That attitude of changing to gratitude rather than feeling sorry for myself which is this place I was really stuck and I'm stuck in feeling like everybody left and here I'm by myself with my loneliness to really actually feeling very grateful for what was going on in my life was huge. It was completely profound and changed my entire perspective.

Keep listening to find out how volunteering can change loneliness to gratitude.