Chronic Comfort Zone as Growth-Avoidance Wrong Attractor: The Familiarity-Maximization Architecture, Life-Space Contraction Basin, and the Return to Vital Engagement

Chronic comfort zone seeking — the anxiety-driven chronic avoidance of challenge, novelty, and growth — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CC in the landscape of vital engagement. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as vital engagement (Csikszentmihalyi): genuine engagement with appropriately challenging activities in the Goldilocks zone, with capacity to encounter novelty without overwhelming anxiety.

W_CC is rigorously distinguished from adaptive rest (which restores for future engagement), healthy contentment (satisfaction with one's actual life), and recovery periods (which are necessary). The wrong attractor is specifically the chronic anxiety-driven selection of only familiar paths, people, and activities to the exclusion of growth. The life-space contraction mechanism is central: each comfort-zone consolidation narrows tolerated experience; avoidance today makes tomorrow's challenges more threatening; the comfort zone shrinks rather than remaining stable.

The anxiety substrate deepens as the boundary of the familiar becomes more threatening with each contraction. Nine formal propositions characterize the life-space contraction dynamic, the anxiety mechanism, progressive contraction under avoidance, vitality depletion, the regret architecture (Bronnie Ware's hospice research), structural distinctions from adaptive states, mindset and self-efficacy as modulators, social life-space contraction, and return paths through graduated exposure and identity experiments.