Office politics. Dictatorial bosses. Coworkers' emotions bouncing up and down and sideways. Hi-tech tools that keep changing and updating. An uncertain economy and a volatile job market. Escalating levels of expectation. Loss of direction. Too much to do. Too little time. Not enough sleep.

Whether you work in a traditional or progressive environment, on your own or in a sea of cubicles, work life is full of challenges. Most of us are beholden to the income we receive from our jobs, and beyond that, we get up and go to work because we have a real desire to contribute to the greater good. Turning away from work is not an option for most of us, so we buck up and throw ourselves into the challenges of the workplace. Some of us are doing well, successful and satisfied. But too many of us are not happy at work. We're stressed out and quite possibly confused. We may appear to be effective, but gnawing issues like those above can make work secretly (or not so secretly) a drag. That's not great for us and it's not great for the people we're working with. So where do we begin if we want to improve our work life for ourselves and those around us? I suggest starting with the mind. Ask yourself: what is the quality of my mind at work? What's happening in my mind as the hours at work go by day in and day out? Is my mind working at its utmost?

The mind contains untold resources and possibilities - for creativity, kindness, compassion, insight, and wisdom. It's a storehouse of tremendous energy and drive. And yet it can also be a nattering annoyance, an untamed animal, or a millstone that drags us down. Sometimes we would like to just shut it off so we can get some work done or have a moment's peace. Yet our mind is the one thing we can't shut off. So why not make the most of it instead? Why not put it to good use? Through mindfulness, we can train our minds to work better.

Men are more likely than women to kill themselves, but less likely to seek therapy. Research suggests part of the problem is that our general model for psychological therapy is more suited to women than men. Therefore we urgently need to develop ways of doing therapy that are more suited to men. The APA recently released guidelines on therapy for men and boys, which were heavily criticised. The new guidance, critics argued, owes more to ideology than science.

However, one of the APA guidelines makes perfect sense. Guideline nine recommends that psychologists should strive to build and promote gender-sensitive psychological services. In a survey of responses to the APA advice published in Quillette, psychiatrist Sally Satel commented that: "'Gender-sensitive' psychological practice ... is questionable because it encourages clinicians to assume ... that gender is a cause or a major determinant of the patient's troubles." In the context of the APA guidelines, I can see why she said this. But being gender-sensitive is not per se a bad thing, so let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Library of Congress hosted a very special guest at story time this week:

Dolly Parton.

The country music legend is also a champion of early childhood literacy, through her Imagination Library. Every month, the nonprofit program mails a free book to more than a million children - from infants to preschoolers.

Parton visited the Library of Congress on Tuesday to celebrate a major milestone in the Imagination Library's history: delivery of its 100 millionth book. Not bad for a program Parton founded more than two decades ago as a small, local effort to help kids in her native Sevier County, Tennessee.

People who actively practice a religion may be happier than the rest, according to a new study.

A Pew Research study analyzed survey data from more than two dozen countries to compare the self-reported lifestyles of religious and non-religious people.

Overall, the researchers found actively religious people tend to be happier, though they aren't necessarily healthier in terms of exercise or obesity rates.

While the link between religion and health may not have been so clear, the findings on self-reported happiness are 'striking,' the researchers say.

The study broke religious participation down to three categories are: Actively religious (regular participation), 'inactively religious' (claim a religious but attend services infrequently), and 'religiously unaffiliated' (people who do not identify with any religion).

More than a third of actively religious adults in the US (36 percent) described themselves as 'very happy' in the surveys, compared to a quarter of both inactive and unaffiliated Americans.

If you want to cultivate a spirit of gratitude, I'd like to suggest that you spend some time in meditation on truth, beauty, and goodness. They each represent gifts to us, things that make life possible, intelligible, and worth living. They are such essential qualities that we call them transcendentals. They transcend our everyday knowledge and point toward a source that is at least capable of truth, beauty, and goodness.

Why do we value them?

1. They are the foundations on which a life worth living is built.
2. They enable discovery, creation, and nurturing of others.
3. They are not wishful thinking.
4. They are transformative.
5. They are indicators that the world is rich, purposeful, and meaningful.
6. They are the product of a designer who knows truth, beauty, and goodness.

Imagination is a wonderful thing. Emotions are often a result of the mind telling us stories without our direction over the outcome. When we imagine any fear repeatedly in a safe environment, soon our phobia, and our brain's response to it, begins to subside.

That's the takeaway of a new brain imaging study led by CU Boulder and Icahn School of Medicine researchers, suggesting that imagination can be a powerful tool in helping people with fear and anxiety-related disorders overcome them.

"This research confirms that imagination is a neurological reality that can impact our brains and bodies in ways that matter for our wellbeing," said Tor Wager, director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at CU Boulder and co-senior author of the paper, published in the journal Neuron.

Being afraid of the unknown is not a new concept. From birth to death we've been trained to fear everything for a very long time. The dangers of modern life have a stranglehold on people's imaginations. Sociologists call the phenomenon a risk society, describing cultures increasingly preoccupied with threats to safety, both real and perceived, but most definitely imagined.

New research in the journal Emotion suggests that people are highly influenced by gossip, even when it is explicitly identified as untrustworthy. The findings indicate that qualifiers such as "allegedly" do little to temper the effects of negative information on a person's likeability.

"Words and phrases like 'apparently', 'allegedly' or 'is suspected of' are frequently used in daily communication, in social media and in media coverage about people, in order to signify the questionable veracity of information. These terms even serve a legal purpose and are intended to prevent false accusations, prejudgments and defamations," said study author Julia Baum of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Berlin School of Mind and Brain.

"Until now, however, little has been known about how our brain processes verbally communicated person-related information of dubious reliability and how this affects our judgments. Do we consider the uncertainty of information in order to temper our judgment about a person, formed on the basis of negative statements, and to prevent misjudgements?"

In two experiments, with 56 German participants in total, the researchers found that the judgment of people was strongly influenced by positive or negative information, even if that information was presented as uncertain.

The time you spend in the garden with your children is invaluable.

If you have children or work with children, then you probably have noticed that hands-on experiences help them make connections to the lessons they are learning. This is especially true when the lesson involves something you enjoy or have made a hobby out of, such as gardening. Hands-on learning experiences surround us if we take the time to look, and educational opportunities abound with a little ingenuity to turn daily tasks into lessons.

Help your children establish a sense of responsibility surrounding planning, caring for, and harvesting their own gardens. Older children can even get in on the spacial awareness, science, and finances behind it all. These lessons easily transfer to a larger picture: namely, how their own responsibilities and care of something living is integral to their attention to personal moral values as they grow.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead famously quipped that a fundamental challenge for any culture is what to do with the young men. Without guidance, young men can become violent and destructive. In every society of which we have substantial knowledge, men are more likely than women to commit violent crimes.

This male/female disparity appears to hold not only across all known human cultures but across the primate order as well. Male chimpanzees engage in violence much more often than female chimpanzees do, and the male/female disparity in violence is larger among chimpanzees than among humans. For example, Jane Goodall and her colleagues found that adolescent male chimpanzees often kill and eat monkeys; adolescent female chimpanzees almost never kill monkeys, preferring a more vegetarian diet.

In the classroom, girls are more likely to seek to please the adult; boys are more likely to disregard or defy the adult. Again, this female/male disparity has been widely documented not only among humans but among chimpanzees in the wild as well. There is a growing disparity in academic achievement, with American boys falling behind their sisters. As a practicing family doctor, and also as a veteran of visits to more than 400 schools over the past 18 years, I have observed that many boys care more about getting to the next level in their video game than about doing well in school and pleasing the teacher. I recently wrote about a boy who stayed up till 3 AM on a school night playing video games. He refused to go to school the following morning, preferring to sleep in. His mother called 911 to ask the police to get her son out of bed. I have never encountered a girl who stayed up till 3 AM playing video games and refused to go to school the next day.

Communication is one of the most important factors in any healthy relationship - whether it's with family, friends, loved ones, coworkers, bosses, or whomever. And much of the social conflict we experience in our lives is due to some type of miscommunication or lack of communication.

One study published in the journal Personal Relationships has identified one pattern that's common in most negative and toxic relationships.

Psychologists looked at over 100 married couples in the U.S. and had them keep diary reports of the status of their marriage and current marital conflicts. The participants also rated their individual depressive symptoms. By analyzing these reports, researchers discovered that a "demand-withdraw" pattern was one of the biggest predictors of marital dissatisfaction and symptoms of spousal depression.

A "demand-withdraw" pattern is when one individual attempts to "demand" a change from their partner, and the partner "withdraws" from the conflict by walking away, being silent, or pretending to ignore the other person.

Both types of behaviors can be damaging toward a relationship: 1) Trying to force someone to make a change, and 2) Not communicating with your partner.

One of the most popular examples of this type of communication style is the "silent treatment." This is when someone tries to express that they are mad by completely cutting off any communication with the other person: no verbal responses, no answering phone calls, no text messages, no eye contact, etc.