on Jane Friedman site:

Writers know how to raise the stakes in a story: introduce a threat, complicate a goal, shorten a timeline. The external pressure grows, but the character often doesn’t. High-stakes scenes feel empty because writers turn to plot mechanics and forget to explore interiority.

As a nurse, I’ve watched people respond to crisis in ways that are messy, contradictory, and human. No two reactions look the same, and none of them resemble the neat “adrenaline surge” we often see in fiction. When you understand stress responses as learned survival strategies, you can turn every high-stakes scene into character development on the page.

This post walks you through the four major stress responses—fight, flight, freeze, fawn—and shows you how to use them to deepen your scenes and reveal your character’s emotional architecture.