Energetic Constraint and Behavioural Attractors: A Framework for Behavioural Stability and Change

Psychological accounts of behaviour under sustained strain commonly describe breakdown, bias or dysregulation, but often leave under-specified why particular patterns recur and resist change across time. This paper develops a constraint-based account of behavioural stability centred on energetic feasibility. It introduces behavioural attractors as relatively stable configurations of attention, regulation, affect and action whose persistence depends partly on their sustainability within the capacities of an organism situated in a particular environment. Under sustained load, behavioural narrowing, reversion and rigidity may emerge not only as failures of motivation or insight, but as lower-cost forms of organisation that preserve continuity under reduced regulatory margins. The framework integrates research on habit, self-regulation, stress and dynamical systems by treating energetic constraint as a boundary condition on behavioural regulation. It further distinguishes capacity-expanding, capacity-maintaining and capacity-contracting attractors according to their effects on future behavioural feasibility. The contribution is theoretical rather than predictive: it clarifies how regulatory demand, environmental scaffolding and path dependence may jointly structure behavioural persistence, relapse and change.