Stress incoherence : A system state in which internal calibrations no longer align with external conditions, generating chronic prediction error, metabolic depletion, or cascading dysregulation; disorder understood as a system state rather than an intrinsic defect
This paper introduces the Evolutionary Stress Framework (ESF), a complexity-based model that reframes neurodevelopmental variation as the emergent outcome of stress–energy regulation and predictive processing over time. Drawing on stress physiology, adaptive calibration theory, predictive processing, and disability scholarship, we review traditional medical, social, biopsychosocial, and hybrid models; examine the contributions and limits of the neurodiversity paradigm; and articulate ESF’s core constructs: emergent neurotypes, stress incoherence, and emergent allostasis. Within ESF, autistic traits function as coherent, context-dependent stress–energy strategies rather than separable strengths and deficits. ESF conceptualizes pathology not as deviation from a normative baseline but as stress incoherence—states in which long-standing calibrations become unsustainable under current environmental conditions. This framework helps explain heterogeneity, developmental change, the clustering of physical and mental health conditions, and the disproportionate burden of burnout and health disparities observed in autistic adulthood. ESF shifts intervention targets from trait suppression to environmental design, co-regulation, and individualized support organized around bio-neurotype–specific regulatory needs. We outline implications for research, clinical practice, and policy and identify directions for empirically operationalizing ESF constructs.
Pathology, in this framework, is not a deviation from a normative baseline. It is a state of the system: what happens when energy-prediction dynamics become unsustainable under current conditions.
ESF introduces the concept of stress incoherence to describe this state. Stress incoherence occurs when a person’s internal calibrations no longer align with external conditions, when the strategies that once enabled survival now generate chronic prediction error, metabolic depletion, or cascading dysregulation across systems. It occurs when trade-offs accumulate unsustainably: when the costs of a regulatory strategy exceed its benefits in the current environment.
This reframe has significant implications. The same person with the same neurology can present as thriving or as disordered, depending on context. The architecture did not change; the fit between architecture and environment did. Autistic burnout, for example, represents not a defect in the person but a state of allostatic overload produced by sustained mismatch between neurotype-specific regulatory needs and environmental demands.
Over time, context-dependent costs accumulate into health outcomes. Sustained mismatch leads to stress incoherence—marked by energetic depletion, prediction error, and the clustering of multisystem health conditions (multimorbidity, anxiety, burnout). When environments are designed to share regulatory labor and align with sensory and communicative needs, the system moves toward emergent allostasis—a dynamic state of sustainable regulation that ESF equates with health.
