Mental Health as Experiential Flow: A Systems Account of Imbalance, Accumulation, and Regulation within the M⁵ Framework

Contemporary approaches to mental health often conceptualize distress in terms of discrete symptoms, localized dysfunctions, or deficits in specific psychological capacities. While such models have yielded important clinical advances, they struggle to explain the delayed onset of symptoms, their tendency to migrate across domains, and the limited durability of symptom-focused interventions. Building on the M⁵ framework of experience—comprising perception, feeling, cognition, action, and awareness (Matta, 2025)—this paper advances a systems-oriented, phenomenological account of mental health as the regulated flow of experience across its dimensions. The central thesis is that mental distress arises not primarily from the absence of capacities, but from relational imbalances within experience: chronic overuse of certain dimensions, systematic underuse of others, shallow or defensive modes of engagement, and reification of experiential content. Drawing on systemic medical logics of accumulation and spillover—paralleling McEwen's concept of allostatic load at the physiological level—the paper argues that imbalance develops gradually as experiential load accumulates in dominant channels until regulatory capacity is exceeded, at which point distress localizes as psychological or somatic symptoms. Rather than addressing symptoms alone, the proposed model emphasizes direct regulation through capacity redistribution. By investing attention and activity into underutilized experiential channels, overall absorptive capacity is increased, allowing accumulated imbalance to diffuse across the system rather than spill over into pathology. Preliminary pilot data (N = 47) provide initial support for the model's key constructs, demonstrating that experiential imbalance correlates with psychological distress and that a brief M⁵-informed intervention increases dimensional accessibility and reduces symptom severity. Mental health is thus redefined as a dynamic condition characterized by sufficient capacity, minimal obstruction, and proportional engagement among experiential dimensions.