I recently read an article in the New York Times by Dr. Pauline Chen entitled, “Can Doctor’s Learn Empathy?” As Dr.

  Stress and the workday go together like…like peanut butter & jelly. Batman & Robin. You rarely think of one without the other.

  Most of our days consist of one routine after another—you get up, brush your teeth. You make that same left-hand turn into the drive through for coffee.

  Do you get ticked off at the littlest thing—and then ruminate about it all day? Or maybe you just get thrown off by something as insignificant as someone walking slowly ahead of you or a car …

  So I’ve been listening to the great granddaddy of motivation, Tony Robbins (his Inner Strength program). He really is the master.

  You’ve heard it over and over—stress makes you sick.

  How well do you recover from disappointment, stress, loss? If you tend to snap back like a taut rubber band, then you’re resilient all right.

  Optimists sometimes get a bad rap. If you tend to be a sunny-sider, chances are you’ve been criticized for being unrealistic, impractical, a dreamer, maybe even dumb.

  It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true: Making rash decisions when you’re stressed may make you too optimistic.

  As a writer, I’ve always known that getting something down on paper feels great.

  It’s the way most of us live now: You’re in the middle of work, when suddenly your email pings.

Karyn Hall, PhD, writes The Emotionally Sensitive Person column on PsychCentral, and she recently posted a piece on how dopamine drives us to seek out sources of pleasure (“Just One More Pair of Sho…