When an event that you wished wouldn’t happen does occur, you might wonder whether some sort of larger purpose is somehow being served, even if you don’t know what it could’ve been at the time.
Perhaps you took an unfortunate spill while on vacation, leading to an afternoon in the emergency room rather than on the beach. The fall required stitches, meaning that there will be no beach days for you until the vacation is almost over. Worse still, you’re in pain.
You might try to figure out if all of this happened “for a reason.” Is life trying to teach you a lesson? Or if not, will the fact that you injured yourself prove to be relevant to some other outcome? Maybe something worse would have happened if you had basked for days in the sun or taken a side trip.
Synchronicity, Meaningful Coincidences, and “Apophony”
According to University of Graz psychologist Christian Rominger and colleagues (2024), people vary in their tendency to draw conclusions from random concatenations of life events. At best, those who see meaning in coincidences tend to be more creative sorts, but at worst, this tendency can reflect “schizotypy,” or adherence to odd and often unhelpful beliefs.
However, maybe there’s something else involved that has nothing to do with personality. Just as you mull over your unfortunate vacation mishap, people may seek patterns where there are none as a way to self-soothe. When good things happen, it theoretically would seem less likely that anyone would conjure up some type of scenario to explain why, because there’s nothing to cope with.
Rominger and his colleagues propose that it is this type of making sense out of bad nonsense that reflects a desire to reduce negative affect. Citing prior research, the Austrian investigators note that “our brain aims to reduce negative emotions by finding patterns in a chaotic and unpredictable reality” (p. 2). If so, then when people experience negative affect, they will seek to find those patterns in the noise of everyday life, and having done so, feel better afterwards.
But there is also the possibility that the search for meaning in randomness reflects a creative thinking style. If that is the case, being happy should make you more likely to expand your mind. The “broaden and build” theory of emotions suggests that your mind is more flexible and curious in that positive affect state.
A Daily Diary Approach to the Search for Patterns
Using data from a previously studied sample, the U. Graz researchers had at their disposal the daily mood ratings of 169 participants (average age of 30 years). Each day for a minimum of two days, participants also reported on “meaningful coincidences” such as “Unexpected solution of a problem (like meeting a friend who wants to sell his computer exactly when we were looking for one).”
Sixty percent of all possible days had at least one meaningful coincidence, and 88 percent of the sample reported one as occurring. Clearly, this sort of thinking is pretty common.
To analyze the coincidence-affect chain, Rominger et al., conducted lagged analyses from one day to the next, separating positive affect from negative affect (i.e. positive day 1->meaningful coincidence->positive day2 and the same for negative). For each lagged analysis, the opposite affect state was also factored into the equation.
Supporting the “broaden and build” hypothesis, the findings indicated that being in a good mood was more predictive of finding meaning in daily events than was a negative affect state. As the authors concluded, positive emotions may be the breeding ground for “curiosity, exploration behaviour, and novelty seeking” which in turn “might be driving mechanisms of meaningful coincidences” (p. 5).
Finding Meaning in Your Own Life Experiences
Returning to the example of your search for meaning in your misfortune, the Austrian team’s findings would suggest that as much as you were brought down in your mood by the injury, your search for deeper patterns may have had less to do with your attempt to cope and more with your enjoyment of mental gymnastics.
How many other times do you like to play with coincidences just for fun? Thinking about your life not as a string of separate instances can help you stitch together a more coherent story about your life.
Alzahra University’s Iman Yusefzade and colleagues (2024) suggest that stressful events can interrupt the stories people tell about their lives. By infusing meaning into these events, it’s possible to regain a sense of agency or control instead of feeling powerless in the face of disturbing experiences. In their words, “making sense of who I was (understanding of self) requires meaning-making, knowing who I am (the content of self) relies on clarity of self-concept, and becoming the self I want (the process of self) requires a sense of agency.”
None of this may be all that consoling in the immediate aftermath of a stressful event—but as you broaden your flexibility over time, maybe, just maybe, when you’re feeling better, you will gain that inner strength to see your life as within your control.
To sum up, seeing patterns in seemingly random events may not be a coping method all that important in the moment, but over time, can help you put your own life story in a perspective that can provide long-term fulfillment.
