PhronesisCompulsive catastrophe-rehearsal—the habitual, near-continuous simulation of worst-case futures—presents itself functionally as danger-preparation, yet operates dynamically as a wrong attractor: a stable basin in cognitive-affective state space from which the organism's actual adaptive capacity is degraded rather than enhanced. We introduce a formal account of this basin structure, grounding it in the concept of a displacement cost D() that measures the distance of any rehearsal episode from the ground state S^0, which we define as calibrated responsive readiness—the capacity to perceive and respond accurately to threats that are actually present.
We define the cumulative burden functional = D()\,dt and characterize the wrong attractor W as the region in which grows without bound while perceived preparedness remains nominally elevated. Nine propositions (P1–P9) establish the core structure: the architectural self-reinforcement of worst-case simulation, the foreclosure mechanism by which present-safety information is discounted or blocked, the asymmetric signal cost that privileges false-alarm over missed-threat, the somatic anchoring of the attractor, the social propagation dynamics, the measurement problem that makes W legible as functionality, the perturbation geometry required for exit, the nature of S^0 as a dynamic rather than static state, and the irreversibility structure of deep attractor residence.
The framework yields concrete implications for both theoretical models of threat-processing and practical approaches to exiting compulsive catastrophe-rehearsal.