The Inner Economy™ maps your finite drive, attention, and appetite for risk and regard across 13 dimensions and three systems — Appetites that spend, Protections that refuse to, and a Treasury that budgets between them — surfacing the tensions where your energy leaks and the one archetype that fits. LBL-original, grounded in current behavioral science.
the drives that pull on your budget
what you refuse to spend, and insure against
how you budget, brake, and replenish
The Inner Economy™ is a LifeByLogic-original educational, reflective tool — it is not a clinical screener, has not undergone psychometric validation, and should not replace consultation with a qualified mental health or medical professional. Read the full methodology for the framework, scoring algorithm, and limitations.
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45 questions · about 12 minutes · everything runs in your browser.
The Inner Economy™ is a LifeByLogic-original 45-item instrument that treats the self as a finite economy: drive, attention, and appetite for risk and regard are limited, and your character shows up in how you allocate them. It measures 13 dimensions across three systems, computes the tensions where two strong pulls draw on the same reserve, blends those into a single Coherence index, and matches one of nine archetypes. Everything below describes exactly what the tool does — and, just as plainly, what it does not yet know.
Most self-assessments add traits up: more of a good thing is a higher score. An economy does not work that way. A budget spent on one thing is unavailable for another, and two strong, opposing demands financed from the same account produce strain rather than a higher total. That interaction — not the sum — is what this instrument is built to surface.
The thirteen dimensions are organized into three systems. Appetites are the drives that spend — Ascent, Tether, Sovereignty, Novelty, Imprint. Protections are what you withhold and insure against — Vigilance, Regard-Cost, Certainty Demand, Guarding. The Treasury is the regulatory layer that budgets between them — Restraint, Replenishment, Modulation — with Coherence sitting on top as a meta-reading of how reconciled the whole system is.
The framework is a lens, not a fact about the world. It earns its place if it helps you see a real trade-off you were already living — not because the three systems carve the mind at its true joints.
Each dimension is measured by three statements rated on a five-point agreement scale; roughly 46% are reverse-keyed to blunt the tendency to simply agree. Items are written fresh for this instrument and are not drawn from any existing questionnaire. Six forced-choice trade-offs follow the rated items; on those, the difficulty of the choice — not just the side chosen — is what the engine reads.
Scoring runs in four stages, all on your device, with no randomness — the same answers always produce the same result.
Each reverse-keyed item is recoded, the three items in a dimension are averaged, and the average is rescaled to a 0–100 figure where 100 is the dimension's high pole at full strength.
A tension is two opposing pulls that draw on one reserve. A constituent dimension counts as live only at 60 or above (using 100 − score for a "low-pole" constituent). When both sides of a two-part tension are live, its load rewards both being high and penalizes imbalance — a pull that dwarfs its opposite is not really a tension:
The forced-choice items act as confirmation only. A "Very hard" rating adds 10 to the mapped tension's load and "Somewhat" adds 5 — but only to a tension that has already fired. A trade-off you found agonizing can strengthen a tension your rated answers already flagged; it can never manufacture one from nothing. The tension with the highest load becomes your load-bearing tension.
Coherence is deliberately not just another self-report scale. It is an even blend of what you said about your own alignment and what your tensions reveal about it, so it falls when your parts are demonstrably bidding against each other even if you would rate yourself as fine:
| Coherence | Band | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 70–100 | Largely aligned | Little energy lost to internal friction; the work is deployment, not repair. |
| 40–69 | Moderate friction | A real but manageable internal tax; one or two trade-offs are doing most of the work. |
| 0–39 | High internal friction | A meaningful share of your energy is spent before any drive does useful work. |
Your dimensions, systems, dominant drive, and Coherence are passed through a fixed, priority-ordered ruleset — the first rule that matches wins — yielding one of nine archetypes (Forge, Tide, Keel, Sentinel, Beacon, Lattice, Wellspring, Outrider, Weave), with a fallback that guarantees every profile resolves. Your archetype is then paired with your load-bearing tension to form a Strain Signature — for example, "a Forge carrying a Striver's Bind." A reachability test (300,000 simulated profiles) confirms every archetype and every tension is actually attainable, so no result is decorative.
The structure — finite allocation, opposing pulls, an interactive rather than additive score — is a considered design. The numbers are not yet calibrated against data. The 60 salience cutoff, the routing gates, the Coherence band edges, and the forced-choice weights are LifeByLogic design choices chosen for face validity, not values estimated from a sample. Internal-consistency reliability has not been measured, and there is no normative dataset behind the figures. Treat the result as a well-built reflection, not a measurement.
It does not — yet. We do not publish percentile norms, because we have not collected a sample large or representative enough to support them, and inventing them would be dishonest. Your numbers are within-person: each of your thirteen dimensions read against the others, not against a population. That makes the profile useful for seeing your own shape and for re-taking over time; it does not place you on a curve. Norms, with disclosed sample characteristics, are a post-launch addition — not a quiet retrofit.
If you reference this instrument in academic or professional work, please cite it as an unvalidated, LifeByLogic-original framework.
The Inner Economy is an original synthesis. It was not derived from the works below, reuses none of their items, and they do not validate it. They are listed because the questions they ask — about approach and avoidance, about autonomy, about whether self-control draws on a limited reserve — shaped the thinking behind the framework. The "finite resource" idea in particular has been actively debated, and that debate is part of why the instrument frames depletion as a budget you can exceed rather than a fixed tank.
Concise answers to the most common questions about this assessment, its method, and how to read your result.
A 45-item self-assessment that treats your inner life as a finite budget. It measures 13 dimensions across three systems — Appetites, Protections, and a Treasury that budgets between them — finds the tensions where two strong pulls compete for the same energy, blends them into a Coherence index, and matches one of nine archetypes plus a Strain Signature.
Most personality tests place you on independent trait scales and add them up. The Inner Economy is built around the interaction between drives — the cost of wanting two opposing things at once — which a sum-based profile can't represent. It's about allocation and friction, not type.
No. It is an original, internally consistent framework, but it has not been through psychometric validation: reliability is unmeasured, the thresholds are design choices, and there is no normative sample. Treat it as a structured reflection, not a measurement.
Not exactly. High Coherence means little energy is lost to internal friction — useful, but it can also mean low ambition or unexamined ease. A moderate score with a clear, named tension is often a more honest and more workable starting point than a high one.
Yes, and it should. Your allocation shifts with circumstance, season, and what you're going through. Re-taking every few months and watching the trend is more informative than any single result.
No. It is educational and reflective. It does not diagnose anything and does not replace evaluation by a licensed mental health or medical professional. If a care-aware note appears on your result, it is a gentle prompt, not a clinical finding.
Yes. The assessment runs entirely in your browser. Your answers are not transmitted to any server and are not stored after you leave the page.
About 12 minutes — 39 rated statements and six forced-choice trade-offs. There's a back button, and nothing advances until you choose.
If your result shows low recovery combined with high alertness and high internal friction, a brief, non-clinical note appears suggesting it may be worth talking things through with someone you trust. It is triggered by a simple pattern rule, contains no diagnosis, and is there out of caution.
You're welcome to use it as a reflective or discussion aid, with the limitations above made clear to anyone taking it. It should not be used as a validated measure, a screening instrument, or a basis for any consequential decision until it has been properly evaluated.