Anticipatory Charge: Unarrived Good Held as Threat, and Effortlessness as Its Resolution Signature

This paper isolates and names a phenomenon that has been repeatedly observed in clinical and practitioner literature but never given a mechanism: anticipatory charge — high-magnitude somatic activation generated by a good that has not yet arrived, held in connective tissue, and reported by the nervous system as threat. The claim proceeds from the central law of Temporal Somatics (Santa Anna, 2026b): valence is a function of the time-window over which a sensation is read, and the body's instantaneous report of any high-magnitude event is bad. This paper identifies a specific and consequential case within that law. Where transformation-in-progress is misread because the transformation is incomplete, anticipatory charge is misread because the event has not occurred at all. The nervous system is allocating resources against a predicted future state for which it holds no valence data, and in the absence of valence data it classifies by magnitude alone. The paper argues that this is not a metaphor but a straightforward consequence of allostatic regulation (Sterling, 2012) combined with the constructionist account of affect (Barrett, 2017): the body regulates by prediction, affect is the summary of that predictive budget, and categorization of affect requires a concept. Where no concept exists for this much good, arriving, the nearest available concept is applied, and that concept is threat. It further proposes a resolution signature: effortlessness on return. Where a task moves from impossible to frictionless with no intervening effort, no skill acquisition, and no change in external conditions, the prior obstruction was load, not capacity or motivation. This is offered as a falsifiable marker distinguishing charge-bound incapacity from its clinical mimics. Finally, it names a population for whom the misclassification is systematic rather than occasional: individuals whose generative output produces a continuous stream of unarrived good. For this population, anticipatory charge is routinely diagnosed as anxiety, and the diagnosis is a category error with a mechanism behind it.