A Cybernetic Perspective on Psychological Wellness

Psychological wellness is critical for human living, and we posit that humans must possess mechanisms that help them achieve and maintain psychological wellness. That is, psychological wellness has goal states that are regulated by humans. This article applies cybernetics, the study of goal-directed systems, as a framework to analyze how humans regulate their psychological wellness. Specifically, we introduce several key concepts in cybernetics relevant for understanding psychological wellness, including feedback, feedforward, passive blocking, variety and channel capacity, and internal models. To illustrate, we show how feedback underlies meaning-making, how feedforward leads anticipatory coping, how blocking is applied by adolescents undergoing individuation, how the importance of channel capacity manifests in mindfulness, and how internal models explain the pursuit of maladaptive goals. Therefore, this paper shows that these cybernetic mechanisms provide a unifying perspective for diverse phenomena in psychological wellness, and provides implications for the conceptualization, design and method for future studies on psychological wellness. Future studies may extend the current framework to additional cybernetic mechanisms and content areas in psychological wellness, and explore social regulations and learning mechanisms in the cybernetic processes of psychological wellness. We propose cybernetics as an indispensable perspective in studying psychological wellness.