Psychology possesses many powerful vocabularies for describing cognition, affect, behaviour, development, and disorder, yet it often lacks a clear cross-scale grammar for describing what systems do under sustained load. Symptoms are named, traits inferred, narratives constructed, and interventions prescribed, but the underlying state dynamics of a person-in-environment are often rendered only indirectly. This paper proposes psycho-thermodynamics as a functional framework for describing regulation, dysregulation, and repair in human systems. The model treats mind not as a sealed object, but as an open, nested system shaped by load, friction, reserves, rhythm, feedback, and phase state. Within this account, entropy refers to rising disorder, noise, dispersion, and loss of usable work; negentropy refers to local order-making through restored structure, signal integrity, rhythm, and capacity; and coherence refers to integrated function across mind, body, behaviour, relationship, and environment. The paper distinguishes classical thermodynamic principles from their functional translation into psychological and systemic language, arguing that many familiar human phenomena — including burnout, rumination, compulsive control, trauma rigidity, relational escalation, and organisational drift — can be more clearly understood as state conditions rather than solely as moral failings, private deficits, or isolated symptoms. The aim is not to reduce psychology to physics, nor to claim literal equivalence between physical and psychological quantities, but to offer a disciplined descriptive grammar capable of clarifying regulation across scales. The paper concludes by outlining implications for psychotherapy, organisational wellbeing, systems practice, and interdisciplinary models of human functioning, while making clear the conceptual and empirical limits of the approach.
Carl Langley (Sat,) studied this question.