In 2021, five-star eventer Hannah Sue Hollberg was unraveling.

On the surface, she’d been holding it together—tackling the biggest courses in the world, keeping up appearances, just another day at the office. But beneath it all, she was struggling. “I felt like I was failing,” she said. “I thought I was wasting everybody’s time.”

An old friend had been popping up on her Instagram feed: Natalie Hummel.

A former upper-level eventer herself, Hummel had left the sport behind and was now deep into wellness and psychology. From the beaches of Costa Rica, she was posting about regulation, self-trust and embodiment.

“It was all this touchy-feely stuff,” Hollberg said. “And I had gotten really good at compartmentalizing, just shutting everything down.”

She scrolled past the posts, resisting the urge to reach out. But eventually, “It got to the point where I had to say something to Natalie, because I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t.”

They got on a Zoom call during the 2021 USEA American Eventing Championships. Hollberg had her laptop open in the middle of the cross-country field, unsure what she needed but desperate to feel something different.

“I was battling an identity crisis. I was in this terrible place. And as soon as I started telling Natalie about it, I started hysterically crying,” Hollberg said. “And I did not cry—especially not then.”

The Nervous System Under Siege

Hummel is a performance coach who helps equestrians break through mental and emotional blocks. Her clients include top-level riders, many of whom arrive stuck in repeating patterns that surface at the worst moments: on centerline, at the in-gate, or in the quiet corners of everyday life.

“A lot of them say, ‘I know what to do, but I can’t do it,’ ” Hummel said. “Or, ‘Right when it matters most, something takes over, and I’m not myself.’ They describe an invisible wall between them and what they’re working toward.”

The problem, she posited, isn’t in the saddle but in the nervous system.

Hummel’s work draws from a growing body of research around Polyvagal Theory, somatic therapy, and the role of the autonomic nervous system in performance. At the core is a simple but powerful idea: When the body senses a threat, it shifts into a state of protection. And equestrian sport, by design, is full of cues the body interprets as threatening—even beyond the fact that you’ve strapped yourself to the back of a prey animal with a mind of its own.

“It’s inherently threatening from a nervous system standpoint,” she explained. “There’s only one winner. It’s a judgment zone. People are watching and evaluating. That activates the stress response.”

According to Polyvagal Theory, your nervous system has three main states: connection, and two states of protection. You’re either in connection, where you feel safe and in a flow, or your system goes into a protection response when it senses danger.

Hummel said riders tend to default into one of three protection states: fight, flight or shutdown. Fight and flight are sympathetic responses, meaning the body is in high-alert mode—amped up, tense, and ready to react through control or escape. Shutdown is a dorsal response, which is the body’s way of conserving energy by going numb, disconnected or frozen when everything feels too overwhelming to handle.

“Now I know: There’s this deeper orientation to life. You can feel good and win. And better than feeling good, you can be free.”

Natalie Hummel

You might think of them as a ladder of physiological responses with flow at the top, followed by fight, then flight, then shutdown at the bottom. “None of the states are inherently bad,” Hummel said. “What matters is whether you can move through them and come back to connection.”

An overreliance on “fight” might look like aggressive over-aiding, a rider in the backseat with spurs dug in and jaw clenched, trying to will the horse over every fence.

“Flight” is marked by frantic energy; you’re rushing through movements or running past distances, jumping up the horse’s neck, just trying to get it over with. Shutdown is a sort of molasses mode; you’re still fussing with the bridle and fantasizing about a nap when you should have been in warm-up 10 minutes ago.

For Hollberg, the home-base feeling she found herself returning to most was shutdown. On cross-country day, for example, “I was a solid block of ice. I couldn’t feel my legs in the warm-up, I couldn’t move, I was so locked up.” Some days she’d rally into peak performance: “I’d kind of black out and do the best round of my life.” Other times, she stayed stuck, and things ended badly, which just perpetuated her cycle of negative self-talk.

She had talked about the feeling with sports psychologists before. They gave her breathing exercises and told her to push away intrusive thoughts. Hollberg said, “Everything they taught me was about not thinking certain things: ‘Don’t think about this, don’t think about that.’ It was all avoidant. They’d get so frustrated with me because I’d say, ‘I can’t feel the way you’re telling me to feel.’ And they’d be like, ‘You just need to try harder.’ And I’d say, ‘I can’t.’ ”

When she sensed herself going into shutdown mode, their advice was to go do something physical to jolt herself out of it. But she still didn’t understand why it was happening or what triggered it. “Like, go do jumping jacks, sure, but why? Why am I wanting to go to sleep right now? What feeling am I trying to avoid?” she said.

Terrified, it turns out, was the feeling she was trying to avoid. An overwhelming fear not of the course but of making a mistake. Hollberg, who had been riding on the world’s biggest stages since her early 20s, was no stranger to riding under pressure or living her life under the public microscope.

But in recent years, pockmarked by a high-profile one-year suspension and an injury that derailed her riding for another few months, she’d felt the stress catching up with her.

Her identity had become tangled up with her top horse Harbour Pilot’s career. “And it was ruining my life,” she said. “I felt so guilty for anything that didn’t go well, because I believed in him so much and believed I was the reason that he wasn’t as good as he could have been. I felt like I was letting everyone down, letting [owner] Ms. Mars down, and I just felt terrible all the time. I was scared to do anything wrong, so I didn’t do anything. I kept thinking, ‘I can’t do this, because I can’t do it right.’ ”

Hummel Comes Full-Circle

These days, you’re more likely to see Hummel on a surfboard than in the saddle. In this new habitat, splitting time between Costa Rica and Atlanta, she appears so carefree and self-assured, it’s easy to forget she carries her own share of scars.

Growing up, she wasn’t the pony-obsessed kid sketching unicorns in the margins of her schoolwork. “My mom did rodeo, backyard-style riding. She was always trying to get me into horses, and I never had any interest,” she recalled.

“I was really focused on swimming. I was a very competitive person. If there was something to try to master, I was relentlessly trying to master it.”

Then, when Hummel was 10, a trainer named Tawn Edwards moved into a neighboring farm. Hummel remembered watching Edwards sail over a jump: “It was like my life stopped. I ran straight into the ring and said, ‘Hi, I’m Natalie. Can you teach me to do that?’ ”

That moment sparked a riding career that would take her to the then three-star level. She funneled every ounce of her drive into improving, eventually going to work for Michael Pollard as a groom and rider.

Pollard was at the top of his game, and the structure and discipline of his program was fuel for Hummel’s fire. Then came every horse person’s worst nightmare: She was driving Pollard’s trailer, loaded with six international-level horses, when an oncoming car pulled out in front of them. There was nothing she could do. The trailer flipped. Three horses died.

“I don’t think I’d experienced, until then, that level of responsibility. That level of suffering and pain,” she said. “But Michael was amazing. He was so tenacious. He didn’t see any mistake; he just kept moving forward. And I just kind of followed along.”

Hummel kept kicking onward, too. She stuffed her feelings down and worked harder than ever, trying desperately to produce results. The high-performance environment piqued her interest in sports psychology, and with Pollard’s encouragement, she decided to study it more formally. While completing a program in Spain, she got a devastating phone call: Her horse had collapsed and died on cross-country with another of Pollard’s students. 

It felt like she’d been dealt another knockout punch before she’d even gotten back on her feet. That’s when she started to question everything. “This sport is heartbreaking,” she said.

She kept riding, halfheartedly—teaching lessons, picking up rides here and there—but her energy was shifting. The same intense focus she’d once poured into horses was now being redirected toward a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. And just like in sport, she couldn’t settle for being mediocre.

She didn’t want to be the kind of therapist who nodded and scribbled into a clipboard. She wanted real solutions. “It was all very Band-Aid-y,” she said. “I was realizing that what they were teaching me in school was never going to help or heal people in the way I wanted to.”

Despite her best efforts to create distance—moving to Bali, taking up surfing, immersing herself in theories and methods that went far deeper than anything she’d learned in school—horses were never far in the rearview. So when

Hollberg reached out, Hummel found herself wondering if the framework she’d been quilting together could hold up in the high-stakes world of equestrian sport. Hollberg became, in Hummel’s words, “a bit of a guinea pig.” They started testing ideas. And to their surprise, they worked.

Healing At The Root

One thing was clear to both of them from the beginning: This wasn’t going to be a patch job. They weren’t interested in mindset tricks or pretending that box breathing in the startbox alone was going to propel Hollberg around a five-star course. “We were going to figure out what was going on and heal it from the root,” Hummel said.

In Hummel’s view, traditional sports psychology, even at its best, can only get you so far. “They’re dealing with only 15% of what’s happening. Your nervous system is dictating 80 to 85% of it,” she said.

That curiosity led her to dig deeper, not just into theory, but into her own story. She didn’t come to nervous system work from a clinical distance. She came to it because she had some healing to do herself.

“I’m my first case study,” Hummel said. “I have a lot of trauma. And I was so resistant to going backwards. I was like, ‘Look, my parents are awesome. Sure, they messed up. But that’s in the past, and here I am, trying to get better.’ ”

She worried that going back was disrespectful. That she should just focus on the future and leave the past alone. But the science wouldn’t let her: “I started seeing these patterns that got formed when I was, like, zero to 14, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Once I started going back to those parts of me that felt really deeply physically and emotionally unsafe, my present started shifting.”

The result was not only performing better. It was feeling better. “Earlier in my life, just feeling good wouldn’t have been enough for me. If you had told me, ‘You can win, but you’ll feel like shit,’ I would’ve said, ‘Sure. Who cares how you feel?’ ” Hummel said. “But now I know: There’s this deeper orientation to life. You can feel good and win. And better than feeling good, you can be free.”

Hummel says that when she asks riders how they want to feel, they almost always say “confident.” But confidence is conditional. It depends on performance—a good round, a ribbon, a personal best. Freedom, by contrast, doesn’t depend on outcomes. It’s rooted in self-worth, in knowing who you are even when things go sideways.

Hollberg felt the difference. Together, they went to the core of how Hollberg’s nervous system got hardwired in the first place. “Part of the work she does is tracing things back, but she doesn’t stay there long,” Hollberg said. “It’s not like therapy where it’s like, ‘Let’s cry about your childhood over and over.’ You work it out as you go. And it’s all useful.”

For example, one memory surfaced from a Pony Club rally when Hollberg was 8 years old. She fell off three times but wasn’t eliminated or allowed to walk off the course. “They made me finish,” she recalled. “I was crying, whipping my pony because I couldn’t get her to go. And they wouldn’t let me quit.”

Pony Club rules meant parents couldn’t be in the stables or communicate with their kids, so Hollberg was left alone to process what, for an 8-year-old kid, amounted to a fairly traumatic experience. When parents were finally allowed in two hours later, her mom ran up, crying, and hugged her. “And forever I’ve had this feeling like I let my mom down,” Hollberg said. “Even though that’s not real. Like, my brain didn’t understand at that point in my life that she was sad for me, not at me.”

With Hummel’s guidance, Hollberg was able to tease apart what she believed from what was actually true: “That’s why my mom and I argued all the time. That’s why I’ve always felt she doesn’t think I’m enough. And it’s not even real; it’s just this complete misunderstanding that got wired in when I was a kid. Now we have such a better relationship.”

The nervous system patterns that once hijacked her ride aren’t gone, but they don’t hold the same power. She doesn’t take everything so personally and hasn’t had frozen legs in a long time.

“As soon as you recognize this stuff and face it, your whole life changes,” Hollberg said. “Natalie says not to avoid what your brain is trying to push away. Go right at it. Feel it. See if it’s actually as bad as your brain’s making you think.”

That shift was liberating, both in the saddle and beyond. “I don’t avoid things anymore,” Hollberg said. “I used to be so non-confrontational, but now I’ll say, ‘Hey, what’s going on with this?’ And it doesn’t bother me. It’s not my identity. I’m not trying to protect myself or avoid feeling bad. I know I can handle it.”

A Better Way Forward

Hummel has distilled her approach into two months-long virtual programs: How To Heal and How To Perform. Each includes audio modules, private podcasts, downloadable resources and twice-weekly group calls, all anchored by a community platform where participants work within their “cohort.” Hollberg assists with How To Perform, and the pair frequently team up for podcasts and clinics.

“In How To Heal, we do more psychoeducation—why things happen, and how to heal,” Hummel explained. “In How To Perform, it’s more about how to be a free, unattached, present competitor. It’s less about outcomes and more about identity, letting go of ‘I am perfect,’ or even, ‘I am good,’ and shifting to, ‘I am willing.’ ”

Both Hummel and Hollberg say that once you start doing this work, you can’t unsee the energy exchanges that are happening around you: in the warm-up, in the barn aisle, out on course. There’s the rider snapping at a groom, the trainer shouting at a student, the tension in the rider’s body, the horse’s reaction to it all.

In her coaching programs, particularly How To Perform, Hummel often reviews videos of clients’ rides. One time, she and Hollberg were looking at footage of a horse spiraling in the show jumping warm-up. Hollberg was about to start dissecting the technique when Hummel paused her. “Your nervous system is on fire,” she told the client. “He’s not responding because he feels so deeply unsafe. Let’s fix that first.”

Horses have their own fight, flight and freeze responses, just like we do. And as humans—predators, for all practical purposes, strapped to the backs of prey animals—we’re asking them to override their instincts and do something deeply unnatural. When we lose sight of that biological reality, things break down. For Hummel, that’s at the heart of her work.

“I just want to help horses,” she said. “It’s hard for me to be in warm-ups and watch riders who aren’t trying to be cruel but are frustrated, unclear and avoiding their own pressure. The horses get the brunt of it.

“Horses are our greatest mirrors,” Hummel added. “Whatever’s happening in your reality is a reflection of your inner world. Whatever’s happening with your horse is a reflection of you.”

Reporting contributed by Erna Adelson.

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This article originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of The Chronicle of the Horse. You can subscribe and get online access to a digital version and then enjoy a year of The Chronicle of the Horse. If you’re just following COTH online, you’re missing so much great unique content. Each print issue of the Chronicle is full of in-depth competition news, fascinating features, probing looks at issues within the sports of hunter/jumper, eventing and dressage, and stunning photography.