Episode 85: Stress & Freeze Response: How to Achieve & Sustain High Performance with Olympian Louise Tjernqvist

Listen to Episode 85 with Louise Tjernqvist →

When Managing Stress Isn't the Goal

You push yourself hard in your work, your healing, or your goals. You're told constantly to manage your stress and slow down. But high performance requires intensity, and you wonder if there's a way to sustain that intensity without burning out completely.

What if managing stress is the wrong goal and harnessing it is what creates sustained high performance?

Can you harness your stress response for sustained high performance without destroying your health? Yes, you can. Managing stress might not actually be what you want or need for the level of performance you're pursuing.

Today I focus on Olympian-level performance with Louise Tjernqvist who understands what it takes to sustain extreme effort over time. Trauma work and personal development can be like Olympic training—it's hard, it's long, and you need to know how to use your stress response effectively to accomplish the changes you want. We look at stress physiology through the high performance lens and explore your relationship with freeze response.

The Performance Equation

How do you effectively harness your stress response and work with freeze for sustained, healthy, high performance? The answer changes everything about your approach to both performance and recovery because it reframes stress from something to eliminate into something to use strategically.

The two important performance measures that determine whether you can sustain high performance are activation physiology and recovery capacity. Both matter equally for long-term success. Most people focus only on activation—how hard they can push, how much they can do, how intense they can go. They completely ignore recovery capacity—how well they restore between efforts. This imbalance eventually destroys performance.

Mastering both activation and recovery represents the foundation of sustained high performance. You need to activate fully when it's time to perform, bringing all your energy and focus to the task. And you need to recover completely afterward, allowing your nervous system and body to restore. One without the other inevitably fails because activation without recovery leads to burnout while recovery without adequate activation leads to stagnation.

Understanding the Biology of Trauma® reveals why recovery capacity matters so much for trauma survivors pursuing high performance. Trauma already compromised your nervous system's ability to regulate between activation and recovery. If you only focus on pushing harder without building recovery capacity, you'll hit a wall where your traumatized nervous system can't sustain the demands you're placing on it.

Routines, Rhythms, and Recovery

Routines and biological rhythms provide the structure that optimizes performance over time. Creating routines that support both activation and recovery means aligning your high-intensity work with your natural energy peaks and scheduling recovery during your body's natural rest periods. This isn't rigid scheduling but rather working with your biology instead of against it.

The guilt around rest undermines performance more than almost any other factor. Most high performers feel guilty taking time to rest and feel uncomfortable with recovery periods. This guilt comes from messages that equate rest with laziness or that suggest you should be able to push indefinitely. This belief system actually undermines performance by preventing the recovery that makes sustained activation possible.

Physical symptoms serve as messages from your body about what you need. Shingles, adrenal fatigue, chronic exhaustion—these aren't just generic stress messages telling you to slow down. Louise explains what those symptoms actually communicate about specific imbalances in your activation-recovery equation. Your body is providing precise feedback if you learn to interpret the messages correctly.

Your relationship with freeze response determines whether you can sustain high performance without completely depleting yourself. For optimal performance, you need a specific relationship with freeze that involves neither fighting it nor fearing it. Working with freeze strategically means recognizing when your nervous system needs to shut down temporarily for restoration versus when freeze is protecting you from something that needs processing.

Reframing Stress and Performance

The stress management myth that pervades wellness culture suggests everyone needs to minimize stress and live more calmly. But high performers don't manage stress in the sense of minimizing it. They use stress deliberately and harness it strategically. They let stress fuel performance rather than viewing it as something to avoid or eliminate. This reframe changes everything about how you approach demanding work or intensive healing.

Techniques for handling high-stress situations that Louise shares aren't about staying calm or eliminating stress. They're about increasing your capacity for stress without compromising your wellbeing or burning out. This means building both your activation capacity and your recovery capacity simultaneously so you can handle more intensity while also restoring more completely.

Trauma work requires Olympic-level effort when you're doing it seriously and comprehensively. Understanding trauma healing as Olympic performance reframes your approach entirely. You wouldn't expect an Olympic athlete to train intensively without proper nutrition, sleep, and recovery protocols. Yet people pursue intensive trauma healing while neglecting the physiological support that such demanding work requires.

The practical application means treating your trauma healing like athletic training by building in adequate recovery, fueling your body properly for the demands you're placing on it, tracking your capacity and adjusting intensity accordingly, and celebrating incremental progress rather than expecting linear improvement.

Sustaining High Performance

Louise emphasizes that sustainable high performance requires understanding your personal capacity for both stress and recovery at any given time. This capacity isn't fixed but changes based on sleep, nutrition, life stress, health status, and where you are in your healing journey. Honoring your current capacity rather than comparing to past performance or others' achievements prevents injury and burnout.

The integration of high performance principles with trauma healing creates a sustainable approach that honors both your ambitions and your biology. You can pursue significant goals and intensive healing while also providing your nervous system with what it needs to sustain that level of effort. This isn't about choosing between performance and health but rather understanding how to support both simultaneously.

For trauma survivors specifically, building performance capacity requires first addressing nervous system dysregulation that limits both activation and recovery. Your trauma work builds the foundation that makes sustained high performance possible by increasing your nervous system's flexibility to move between states appropriately. The somatic and nervous system work you do isn't separate from your performance goals but rather essential preparation for them.

Understanding that stress isn't inherently bad but rather a tool for performance removes unnecessary guilt and anxiety about pursuing challenging goals. Stress becomes something you use deliberately rather than something happening to you uncontrollably. This shift in perspective and relationship with stress allows you to harness it for growth and achievement rather than just surviving it or trying to eliminate it entirely.

This Episode Is For:

✓ High performers feeling burned out despite loving their work 

✓ Anyone doing intense trauma work that feels exhausting 

✓ People who push hard but don't recover well 

✓ Practitioners helping clients sustain high performance 

✓ Those who feel guilty about resting or recovering 

✓ Anyone wondering if high performance and healing are compatible

What You'll Learn

Listen to learn how Olympians use stress and freeze response for sustained high performance and why recovery capacity matters as much as activation capacity. Discover why managing stress might not be your goal if you're pursuing high performance. Understand how to treat trauma work like Olympic training including the recovery protocols that work demands.

Sustained high performance requires mastering both activation and recovery rather than just pushing harder.

Listen to Episode 85 with Louise Tjernqvist →

Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared reflects my clinical expertise and research, but every person's biology and healing journey is unique. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers before making changes to your treatment plan or starting new interventions. If you're experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact emergency services or a crisis helpline immediately.

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