What this self-check measures
The five statements above come from the WHO-5 Well-Being Index — and they measure something almost no other major mental health scale touches: the presence of good things.
Nearly every questionnaire in this territory counts symptoms. How often were you down, worried, restless, hopeless? The WHO-5 flips the lens. Over the last two weeks, how often did you feel cheerful? Calm? Active? Did you wake up rested? Was your daily life filled with things that actually interested you? Not the absence of the bad — the presence of the good.1
That's a real distinction, not a framing trick. You can score low on a depression screen and still feel gray, flat, and running on fumes — because "not depressed" and "well" are not the same state. The WHO-5 measures the second one directly. If a symptom screen is a smoke detector, this is a light meter.
The window is the same two weeks used by screens like the PHQ-9, and for the same reason: everyone has good days and bad ones. The WHO-5 is asking about the sustained texture of your recent life, so the honest answer is about frequency — how much of the time — not about your best or worst afternoon.
How scoring works
Each of the five items is scored 0 ("at no time") to 5 ("all of the time"), giving a raw total between 0 and 25. Per the official manual, that raw score is multiplied by 4 to produce a final score from 0 to 100 — where 0 is the worst imaginable well-being and 100 the best. Higher is better, which catches people out if they're used to symptom screens where higher means worse.
| Score | Band | Standard reading |
|---|---|---|
| 0–28 | Very low well-being | The manual recommends following up with a depression screen |
| 29–49 | Low well-being | Below 50 is the official threshold for "worth looking into" |
| 50–68 | Moderate well-being | Functional, with room to breathe better |
| 69–100 | High well-being | Well-being is genuinely present, not just symptoms absent |
Two thresholds in that table carry official weight. A score below 50 is the standard cutoff for low well-being — the point at which the last two weeks deserve some honest attention.1 And a score of 28 or below is where the WHO-5 manual specifically recommends taking a depression screen as a next step,2 because very low well-being and depression overlap often enough that it's worth checking. The PHQ-9 on this site is the standard instrument for exactly that, and it's as private as this one.
Why the positive wording matters
The upbeat phrasing isn't cosmetic. It buys the WHO-5 two properties that symptom screens struggle with.
First, sensitivity to change. Symptom counts have a floor: once you're reporting few symptoms, there's nowhere lower to go, and improvements past that point vanish from the data. Well-being has headroom in both directions. The difference between "getting through the weeks" and "waking up interested in them" is invisible to a depression screen and squarely on the WHO-5's dial — which is one reason researchers reach for it when tracking whether life is actually getting better, not just less bad.1
Second, it never asks you to pathologize yourself. There's no question on this scale you'd hesitate to answer at a kitchen table. That sounds soft, but it has hard consequences: people answer positively-worded scales more willingly and more often, which makes the WHO-5 unusually good for the thing this site cares most about — checking in regularly, over months, without the check-in itself feeling like a clinical event.
What to do with your score
If you scored 50 or above: the most useful move is noticing what's generating the number. Look at how the five items split. High well-being isn't weather — it's made of specific, findable things: the sleep that's working, the people you saw, the work that held your interest. Knowing what your good weeks are made of is exactly what lets you rebuild them after the hard ones. Even in a solid total, the lowest-scoring item is a map: if "woke up feeling fresh and rested" is dragging behind the others, that's your foundation to tend this month.
If you scored below 50: don't treat the number as a character verdict, because it isn't one. Low well-being usually tracks concrete conditions — load, sleep, isolation, a life short on things that interest you — and the five items tell you which. Find your weakest item and make one specific change aimed at it, then re-check in two weeks to see if it moved. If your load itself is the suspect, the Ballast Stress Check looks at that side of the ledger directly.
If you scored 28 or below: take the manual's advice seriously. Follow up with the PHQ-9 depression screen — it takes two minutes, and it's the standard next step for a reading this low. And consider a professional conversation regardless of what the second screen says: two weeks this heavy deserve more support than a questionnaire can offer. Reaching out at this point is judgment, not surrender.
Using your history
This tool keeps your results on your device (and only there), so retakes build a private trend line — and with the WHO-5, the trend is where the real information lives.
A single score of 56 tells you a little. A slide from 76 to 56 over two months tells you a lot, even though the second number never crossed an official threshold. Because the scale is sensitive to change, it makes an honest early-warning instrument: well-being usually erodes before symptoms arrive, so a steady downward drift is a signal worth acting on while the acting is still easy.
One caution about reading your own line: don't over-interpret a single dip. Well-being scores move with season, workload, and sleep, and one low reading after a brutal fortnight is your instrument working, not your life failing. What deserves attention is direction sustained across two or three readings — that's a pattern, and patterns have causes you can go looking for.
Every two to four weeks is a good rhythm while you're working on something; monthly or quarterly works as a baseline. The Steadiness Log complements the retakes at a daily grain — quick entries between check-ins that catch the texture a two-week questionnaire smooths over.
Where the WHO-5 comes from
The WHO-5 was derived in 1998 at the Psychiatric Centre North Zealand in Denmark, distilled from longer WHO well-being scales into five items that could stand alone.2 The World Health Organization adopted it, and it spread with unusual speed for a mental health measure: it has since been translated into more than 100 languages and used across an enormous range of settings — general practice, diabetes care, workplace studies, older-adult care — with a 2015 systematic review of 213 studies concluding it holds up as a valid, sensitive measure of well-being across all of them.1
WHO holds the copyright and makes the instrument free to use with attribution, which is what allows us to offer it here: the five official items, the official 0–100 scoring, the official thresholds — scored in your browser, so your answers never leave your device.