Compulsive Self-Quantification as Embodied-Experience Wrong Attractor: The Measurement-Compulsion Architecture, Felt-Sense-Bypass Basin, and the Return to Embodied Self-Knowledge

Compulsive self-quantification — the chronic pattern of compulsively measuring, tracking, and quantifying all aspects of one's physical and psychological experience as a control mechanism that substitutes numerical representation for genuine embodied self-knowledge — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CSQ in the landscape of embodied self-knowledge. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as embodied self-knowledge: the capacity to access one's own states, needs, capacities, and experiences through direct felt sense — using measurement selectively and instrumentally where it genuinely adds information — without requiring numerical mediation to trust or act on one's own experience.

W_CSQ is rigorously distinguished from appropriate use of health metrics, legitimate biofeedback, informed self-monitoring in medical contexts, and adaptive use of data to support genuine self-understanding. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: felt-sense bypass (the compulsive self-quantifier replaces direct access to bodily and psychological states with metric proxies; D(ξ) is generated by unquantified experience, which feels epistemically insufficient; the capacity for direct felt-sense access progressively atrophies), control illusion maintenance (quantification creates the felt sense of mastery over biological and psychological processes, substituting dashboard management for genuine self-regulation), and measurement anxiety loop (metrics generate comparison baselines; deviations from baseline generate anxiety that disrupts the states being measured, producing more concerning metrics that increase tracking).

The Knowledge Paradox is central: compulsive self-quantification reliably produces self-ignorance — by replacing felt-sense access with metric proxies, the compulsive self-quantifier progressively loses the capacity to know their own states directly while accumulating more data about themselves. Nine formal propositions characterize the embodied self-knowledge ground state, the measurement-compulsion wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the knowledge paradox, developmental roots in performance-metric environments, and return paths through felt-sense cultivation, metric fasting, somatic awareness training, IFS work, and graduated trust in unquantified experience.