PhronesisCompulsive early arrival—the systematic behavior of presenting oneself at scheduled locations or events with buffers far exceeding logistical necessity—represents a clinically underexamined temporal anxiety syndrome with significant consequences for subjective wellbeing, relational attunement, and present-moment engagement. We analyze this phenomenon through the displacement framework, characterizing compulsive early arrival as a wrong attractor W in the phase space of temporal behavior: a stable but maladaptive equilibrium that forecloses the ground state S^0 of calibrated time engagement.
We introduce the displacement cost function D(), which quantifies deviation from S^0 across behavioral, affective, and relational dimensions, and define the accumulated temporal anxiety = D()\,dt as a measure of chronic burden. Nine formal Propositions characterize the attractor's architecture: its self-reinforcing buffer-override mechanism, the foreclosure basin that traps individuals in anticipatory vigilance, phase transitions between latent and manifest anxiety states, and the intervention geometry required for recovery.
We distinguish compulsive early arrival from adaptive punctuality, examine its systemic effects on co-present others, and derive conditions under which return to S^0 becomes dynamically accessible. The framework has implications for temporally-inflected anxiety treatment and for broader theories of behavioral wrong attractors.: temporal anxiety, wrong attractor, calibrated time engagement, punctuality, displacement cost, behavioral foreclosure, relaxed temporal presence