Tuning Open: A New Antidote to Stress

According to Gallup, the number of Americans who report being stressed has inclined over the past 30 years. Data from 2023 shows that nearly half, 49%, of all Americans report that they “frequently experience stress”, which is 16 points higher than it was two decades ago.

Not surprisingly, the numbers are worse for women. In 2023, 53% of women reported frequently experiencing stress, compared with 45% of men, a gap that had widened over the previous 6 years.

Another recent study by Neupane and colleagues (2025) found people experience 5.39 stressors per day, on average, the top three recurring stressors being related to work, health and transportation. Stress is a rising and daily problem of modern life.

I don’t know about you, but one of the ways I try to cope with stress is “numbing by television”. When the world feels like it is impinging on me, I try to shut it out by binging on somewhat mindless Telly. I am embarrassed to publicly share this, but in the name of authenticity I guess WTH, I basically binged the whole “Vampire Dairies” series over the last several months. Clearly, I’ve been stressed.

However, I have since been thinking that instead of tuning out, which feels instinctual and protective, a way out of stress may be to tune open.

From Open Presence…

I heard Deepak Chopra once said, “Stress is resistance to existence,” and I had a literal experience of a lightbulb turning on in my head.

It is our resistance to what is, a tightening against life, that creates stress.

On an episode of The Mindful Living Podcast, Ellen Slater expressed a similar idea suggesting that the moment we judge the present, we are no longer present, we lose contact with it.

Judgement takes you out of present moment awareness by resisting what is. When we try to shape, change, control, or push against what is in front of us, we generate friction in our lives. When we think, “Why is this happening?”, or when we categorize things as good or bad, we come into tension with what is, and we create stress. Chopra explains, if however, we bring presence to the now, then there is no stress, there is flow.

This presence is an open presence; meeting life where it is, releasing judgement, allowing and accepting all that is. Drawing again on Ellen Slaters words, “It is surrendering the agenda of anything being different.” No resistance, no friction, no stress.

I can, however, already sense the resistance you might have to the concept of no resistance, as you are reading this blog. As humans, we are fighters and survivors. If we weren’t, we would not be among the 0.01% of species that ever existed on this planet, to have survived. So, allowing what is, seems counter intuitive; We prefer to try to bend the world to our preference.

Allowing what is, however, is not about giving up our fight for better. There is a difference between fighting for versus fighting against. Fighting against what is drains energy and breeds stress, fighting for activates motivational energy and fuels forward movement. Think of the difference between swimming against the tide versus swimming with it. We can fight for while still allowing what is, with the result that we will get further.

Allowing, is akin to accepting what we cannot control. Stress arises from our efforts to control what is not ours to control, but by allowing, we reduce stress and refocus our energy on what we can influence.

…To Tuning Open

I would like to push our exploration slightly beyond open presence.

During my meditation this morning, in a moment where my mind chatted wildly as it often does, a thought emerged around the idea of tuning open, a state of not only allowing and accepting, but also consciously opening ourselves to receiving. Tuning open, as I started to conceive of it, extends further than acceptance - it involves softening our mental structures, to not only accept what is, but also to receive what the present moment offers. It involves allowing ourselves to be touched and changed by what is.

To explain what I mean by softening our mental structures, think about what our minds do when we name something. Naming is basically our brain’s way of verbally categorizing things. A chair, a bird, a phone. It puts what we experience into mental categories so we can quickly understand all the facets of that experience without having to relearn them. A chair is for sitting, a bird sings and flies, a phone is…well for everything! But if we consider this further, we can see naming also elicits expectations, or preconceived notions. In general, we expect a chair to have four legs, to be at a certain height, and we don’t expect it to fly.

The brilliance of mental categories is they allow us to quickly assess the world, processing vast amounts of data, in an instant. The downside of mental categories is they stop us from learning more, from seeing beyond our expectations, and from remaining open to alternatives. In this way, even naming a thing is a form of judgement.

Mental categorization is in opposition to open presence, constricting into boxes the information that comes into our consciousness.  When rigid, mental categories shut off learning and growing and at an extreme, are the birthplace of bias.

Tuning open is a re-opening, a blurring of lines, a loosening of the edges so we can take in what we experience in a new and fresh way. While I can see how it might be mentally difficult to ‘unlearn’ everything we think we know, I wonder about the opportunity tuning open can create for our evolution.

Tuning open requires trusting that in this present moment, there is an offering. Even if that offering is a challenge, we can open to the opportunities and possibilities that are present within, knowing that perhaps that challenge is making us stronger and more whole.

When we move beyond resistance and open channels of receiving, we not only allow and accept, but we grow in our interaction with the world. We move from stress to opportunity.