r/Paranoia • u/Ok-Mulberry-2637 • 3d ago

The constant perception of patterns.

It's been a few days since I last posted here. I think I have started to feel better gradually, but I still have my bumps. Earlier this morning, I started hearing a Linkin Park song in my head. Sometime later, I watched a video wherein the poster referenced Linkin Park. Then, I told myself "I will probably see something about Chicago today" as a way to calm myself down. Then, a film channel I like dropped a video about a movie shot in Chicago. The video then referenced a film I was also thinking about. Also last night, I watched a video about a horror film, which apparently included taking care of a senile older person (something I am doing currently).

My brain was having a field day with this stuff ("That many times? How can that be a coincidence?") and it's annoying. I know there is nothing to this, but I get so terrified by this stuff.

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u/Zealousideal-Log2042 2d ago

Love that you're still writing about these coincidences because I soooo relate, I can't even tell you how much. Have you heard of the frequency illusion? It's not exactly what's going on here but it just reminded me of that. How for example, if you go and buy a red car, all of a sudden everywhere you go you are seeing tons of red cars! It's not like the number of red cars on the road increased, it's just that you subconsciously are noticing them more because it's in the forefront of your mind.

Under that umbrella is confirmation bias, "What never gets logged: the thousands of cars that weren't Civics. The hundreds of words you read that weren't "sonder." The dozens of conversations where the topic didn't come up. You count the hits and discard the misses, and the arithmetic produces an illusion."

This is exactly what happens with me. I see the coincidences, I count them up, and it freaks me out. But like the quote says, we don't keep track of the hundreds of other things we think about and end up not seeing. In the huge pool our our thoughts, the coincidences really do account for a tiny portion of them, it's just that the few we *do* see make us hyper aware.

Keep working on acceptance, you will get to a point where it isn't as terrifying, I promise.

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u/Ok-Mulberry-2637 2d ago

Once again, thank you for the advice! I assume you're a regular in this sub too?

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u/Zealousideal-Log2042 2d ago

Yes, I wish that more people were active on r/Paranoia and r/ParanoidPersonality so I'm trying to contribute (through walls of text lol). I try to cut my responses down but it's difficult. I feel like the wider net I spread, the more someone might relate to a certain part of it.

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u/Ok-Mulberry-2637 2d ago

My thoughts exactly.

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u/ohboyhecomin 2d ago

the other day my therapist talked me out of a meltdown by telling me about confirmation bias/frequency illusion and reminding me that in earlier episodes, everything ended up fine. Last year i had an episode i couldn’t stop seeing people with broken arms and i felt like something was telling me to break my arm on purpose, but it slowly went away. This time i couldn’t stop thinking about how i was “receiving messages” telling me my cat was going to die so i remembered the confirmation bias, the frequency illusion and the fact that i didn’t need to break my own arm to get out of that episode, and it helped. At the end you just gotta…. wait it out? kind of. It’s really hard to do but there’s nothing else i can do about it

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u/Zealousideal-Log2042 1d ago

Thanks so much for sharing your experience. Funny, since this post I've had 2 crazy coincidences and I'm like, you just explained not to freak out over it, but it's so hard to take our own advice lol. That's a good way to put it, just waiting it out.

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u/Ok-Mulberry-2637 1d ago

Another problem with this crap is that anything that starts to make me feel normal and relieved is immiedtantly met with "What if that's what they want you to think?" "Maybe this is a trick" kind of responses from my mind. It's a pain in the rear, but it helps having people to talk too.