Anxiety is one of the most common mental illnesses in the United States. In this project, I chose to explore how food is one of the most accessible and inexpensive ways of treating anxiety. This creative project examines the major key components of gut health including the balance of neurotransmitters and bacteria in the gut, restoring hydrochloric acid through celery juice, removing heavy metal toxins through food, eating fermented foods, and limiting refined carbohydrates, and high-sugar consumption. Additionally, this creative project explores my own personal journey through the implementation of foods that influence anxiety revealed in a systemic review over the course of a 6-week period.

We attempted to apply a novel approach to stock market predictions. The Logistic Regression machine learning algorithm (Joseph Berkson) was applied to analyze news article headlines as represented by a bag-of-words (tri-gram and single-gram) representation in an attempt to predict the trends of stock prices based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The results showed that a tri-gram bag led to a 49% trend accuracy, a 1% increase when compared to the single-gram representation’s accuracy of 48%.

The field of veterinary medicine can be rewarding, but also very demanding. Research has shown that many practicing veterinarians struggle with mental illness, and the profession has one of the highest suicide rates in the United States. Research has also shown that many veterinary students struggle with mental illness. It is important to further research the mental health of veterinary students and how that can correlate with one's mental health as a practicing veterinarian. The purpose of this project is to summarize findings of the literature concerning the mental health of veterinary students and to present a new resource, the Wisdom Vet app, that can potentially support the well-being of veterinary students.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether athletes were impacted by wearing a mask and playing competitively, by measuring their mental skills (confidence, anxiety, and focus) levels. This study surveyed 7 high school students who played sports in the year 2020-2021. They were surveyed using the “state sport confidence inventory”, “sport competition anxiety test”, and a created focus survey (Appendix D). The participants were asked a series of questions reflecting back on before wearing a mask and questions pertaining to how they feel about wearing a mask in sports. The survey asked the participants specifically about their mental skills. These mental skills are important factors in optimal performance of an athlete, athletes should have high confidence, low anxiety, and high focus levels (Lautenbach et al., 2016). The results showed that athletes had high confidence, low anxiety, and high focus; athletes were more worried about getting the proper amount of oxygen and fixing their mask. This suggests that the athletes who participated in the survey were mentally tough (Bédard Thom et al., 2021) and resilient (Sarkar & Fletcher, 2014).

Social media has become a prominent part of people’s life worldwide. It allows for easy communication and connection between family, friends, and even complete strangers. It has provided for an increased global interconnectedness and allows people to form new relationships. Despite these positives, there are also negative effects of social media, including its danger to mental health. With increased social media use, it is possible to develop an addiction, similar to any substance addiction. People may also experience various mental health disorders, like depression and anxiety disorders. The purpose of this review was to identify a clear relationship between social media use and the development of anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders is a general term, encompassing the different types, but the main types focused on in this review are generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety. This review also incorporates information on age in order to clarify if certain age groups are more affected by social media use than others.