What this self-check measures
The seven questions above come from the GAD-7 — the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 questionnaire — one of the most used anxiety screens on the planet.1 It doesn't ask whether you are anxious; it asks how often specific symptoms have shown up over the last two weeks: the worry you can't put down, the trouble relaxing, the restlessness, the sense that something bad is coming.
That two-week window matters. Everyone has anxious days — a presentation, a bill, a kid's fever. The GAD-7 is looking for the background level: what your nervous system has been doing between events, not during them. That's why the honest answer is usually about frequency ("how often"), not intensity ("how bad").
How scoring works
Each answer is worth 0 to 3 points — from "not at all" to "nearly every day" — for a total between 0 and 21. The bands you see with your result are the same ones used in clinics:
| Score | Band | Standard reading |
|---|---|---|
| 0–4 | Minimal | Symptoms at the level of ordinary background noise |
| 5–9 | Mild | Noticeable, usually manageable with good foundations |
| 10–14 | Moderate | The level where a professional conversation is usually recommended |
| 15–21 | Severe | Clear signal — support measurably helps at this level |
Two things are worth knowing about that table. First, the cutoff of 10 isn't arbitrary: in the original validation study it identified generalized anxiety disorder with 89% sensitivity and 82% specificity,1 and a later meta-analysis across dozens of studies held the finding up.2 Second, the GAD-7 casts a wider net than its name suggests — elevated scores also show up with panic disorder, social anxiety, and PTSD, which often travel together with generalized anxiety.3
What a score can and can't tell you
A screening score is a signal strength reading, not a verdict. It can't diagnose you — no questionnaire can — and it can't tell the difference between anxiety that's pointing at something real and anxiety that's running on habit.
That difference happens to be this site's whole premise. The Ballast Principle starts from the observation that some of your anxiety is right: it's accurate information about a workload, a decision, a risk worth respecting. The rest is noise — old patterns, overload, a nervous system scanning out of habit. A GAD-7 score tells you how loud the signal-plus-noise is. It takes a different kind of check to separate them — that's what the Weather Check does, and it pairs naturally with this one.
So read your score the way a sailor reads a barometer: it tells you the pressure, not what to do about it. What to do about it depends on what's generating the reading.
If your score was minimal or mild
First: believe it. People who carry anxiety often distrust good readings, assuming they answered wrong or caught a lucky fortnight. If your last two weeks genuinely read minimal or mild, your current load and your current capacity are roughly in balance.
The useful move at this level is maintenance, not intervention. The foundations — sleep, movement, food, people — do more for background anxiety than any technique, and they're cheaper to keep than to rebuild. If one number in your life is quietly degrading, it's usually sleep. A mild score with rising sleep debt is a forecast, not a coincidence.
If something still feels off despite a low score, that's worth respecting too. A two-week symptom screen can miss a specific, well-founded worry that hasn't colonized your days yet. Run it through the Weather Check — if it's a signal, it deserves an action, not a score.
If your score was moderate or severe
A score of 10 or more is the level where clinicians recommend a real conversation — with a doctor, a therapist, or whatever door is easiest for you to walk through. Not because the number proves something is wrong with you, but because at this symptom level, support measurably helps, and white-knuckling it measurably doesn't.
Two practical notes from people who've been there:
- Print or share the result. The hardest part of the first conversation is often the first sentence. Walking in with "I took a GAD-7 and scored 14" replaces five minutes of throat-clearing with a number the clinician immediately understands. The print button above formats your result for exactly this.
- A high score doesn't cancel your competence. The premise of this site's book is that plenty of capable, high-functioning people run anxious. Seeking support isn't a demotion — it's what handling it looks like. Calling for support in time is judgment, not surrender.
If any part of your last two weeks has included thoughts of harming yourself, skip every queue: the crisis lines in the footer of this page are staffed now.
Using your history
This tool keeps your results on your device (and only there), so retakes build a private trend line. The trend is more honest than any single reading — anxiety scores wobble with sleep, deadlines, and season. Retake every two to four weeks while you're actively working on something, or quarterly as a baseline check alongside the Steadiness Log, which tracks the other half of the picture: not how loud the anxiety is, but how well you're carrying it.
Where the GAD-7 comes from
The GAD-7 was developed in 2006 by Robert Spitzer, Kurt Kroenke, Janet Williams, and Bernd Löwe, validated on nearly 3,000 primary-care patients.1 Its development was funded by Pfizer, which later made the instrument — along with the PHQ-9 depression screen — freely available for use without permission or fees.4 That open license is why you'll find the same seven questions in health systems and research worldwide, and why we can offer them here, verbatim and free.
Our implementation adds nothing to the instrument and takes nothing away: the seven official items, the official scale, the official bands — scored in your browser, so your answers never leave your device.