How anxious have you been lately?

1)What is the GAD-7?

The GAD-7, short for Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale, is a brief questionnaire that screens for generalized anxiety. It was developed by Robert Spitzer and colleagues in 2006 and has since become one of the most widely used anxiety measures in primary care, research, and mental-health services around the world. It asks how often, over the last two weeks, seven common anxiety symptoms have bothered you, from feeling nervous or on edge to being unable to stop worrying.

Its popularity comes from being short, well validated, and easy to repeat. A doctor can hand it to you in a waiting room, and you can take it again a fortnight later to see whether anything has shifted. That repeatability is a big part of why it is useful: anxiety is a moving target, and a measure you can retake cheaply tells you more over time than any single reading.

2)Signs and symptoms of anxiety

Anxiety is not only a feeling in your head; it shows up across the mind and body, which is part of why it can be so hard to place. The GAD-7 focuses on the core emotional and cognitive signs, but the full picture is broader.

• Mental: persistent worry, racing or looping thoughts, trouble concentrating, expecting the worst, difficulty switching off.
• Physical: a racing heart, tight chest, restlessness, tense muscles, stomach trouble, tiredness, and disrupted sleep.
• Behavioural: avoiding situations that trigger it, seeking constant reassurance, procrastination, and irritability.

Everyone experiences some of these at times; that is normal and often useful, since a certain amount of anxiety sharpens focus and keeps you safe. What the test is really probing is frequency and persistence, how often these have been present over the last two weeks, because that is what separates ordinary stress from something worth a closer look.

3)How the scoring works

Each of the seven questions scores from 0 (not at all) to 3 (nearly every day), so your total runs from 0 to 21. A higher total points to more anxiety. The commonly used cut-offs are:

A score of 10 or more is the usual threshold at which clinicians consider a fuller assessment. It is worth knowing that the GAD-7 was designed to be sensitive, meaning it errs slightly towards flagging people rather than missing them. A raised score is an invitation to look closer, not a verdict.

4)What your score means, and what it doesn't

A single score is a snapshot of the last two weeks, not a label and not a diagnosis. Anxiety naturally rises and falls with sleep, stress, hormones, workload, and life events, so the direction it moves over time matters far more than any one number. Two people can both score 8 and be in completely different places: one climbing towards a hard month, the other recovering from one.

It is also worth being clear about the test's limits. The GAD-7 was built specifically for generalized anxiety, the free-floating, hard-to-switch-off kind of worry. It is not designed to pick up panic disorder, social anxiety, phobias, or obsessive-compulsive patterns, though it often catches their overflow. And because it relies on your own honest reporting of the last fortnight, a bad two weeks can inflate it and a good two weeks can flatter it. This is exactly why retaking it and watching the trend is more informative than fixating on a single result.

5)What to do next

• Minimal or mild: simple daily habits, steady sleep, regular movement, paced breathing, cutting late caffeine, and brief check-ins, often keep things from building.
• Moderate: keep an eye on it, put the basics in place, and consider a conversation with your doctor if it holds or climbs over the coming weeks.
• Moderate to severe: it is worth speaking to a doctor or therapist. Treatments such as CBT and, where appropriate, medication are well established and effective. A screen is a prompt to get a proper assessment, not the assessment itself.
• In every case, retake the test every couple of weeks. The trend line tells you far more than any single reading.

If you are struggling to cope, or you are having thoughts of harming yourself or feel in immediate danger, please contact local emergency services or a crisis line you trust right now. You do not have to manage this alone, and reaching out is a sign of strength, not weakness.

6)Why tracking anxiety over time helps

A test taken once tells you where you are today. A test taken regularly tells you where you are heading, and direction is what you can actually act on. Tracking your anxiety alongside everyday factors like sleep, exercise, and stressful events tends to surface patterns that are invisible from the inside, that your worst stretches follow short nights, say, or that things reliably lift after a couple of active days. Those patterns are where change becomes possible, because they turn a vague sense of being anxious into specific, addressable causes. Andy is built around exactly this loop: a quick daily check-in, and a clear view of how your mood and anxiety move over the weeks.

7)About this test

The GAD-7 is a public-domain instrument, free to use without permission. This page follows the original scoring and is intended for screening and education only. It does not store your answers and is not a substitute for professional care or diagnosis. Source: Spitzer RL, Kroenke K, Williams JBW, Löwe B (2006), A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: the GAD-7, Archives of Internal Medicine. Last reviewed August 2026.