Anxiety Screener (GAD-7)

Anxiety becomes a concern when worry, nervousness, and tension stop being occasional and start being persistent - hard to switch off, and heavy enough to affect your sleep, focus, and day. This self-assessment is based on the GAD-7, the most widely used brief screener for generalized anxiety, which asks how often anxiety symptoms have troubled you recently and summarizes their severity.

This is a screening tool, not a diagnosis. It screens for the severity of anxiety symptoms; it does not, and cannot, diagnose an anxiety disorder. Only a qualified health professional can do that, through an evaluation that considers your history, context, and how symptoms affect your life. An elevated result here means your recent symptoms are frequent enough to be worth attention and a conversation with a professional - a starting point, not a conclusion.

The questionnaire has just 7 items and takes about 3 minutes. It asks how often, over the past two weeks, you have been bothered by common anxiety symptoms. Your answers combine into a single severity result placed against established screening thresholds, so you see how troubling your recent anxiety has been rather than a raw number in isolation. If you are struggling right now, you do not need to wait for a result to reach out for support.

The GAD-7 measures a single thing: the severity of generalized anxiety symptoms over the past two weeks. Its seven items cover the core features of anxious distress - excessive worry, trouble relaxing, restlessness, irritability, and a sense of dread - and combine into one summed score that maps onto commonly used severity bands from minimal to severe. It is not a checklist of separate anxiety disorders; it captures the shared symptom load that runs across them.

Because it measures recent symptom severity rather than a diagnosis, your score reflects how much anxiety has been troubling you lately, not a fixed condition or a statement about who you are. A higher score signals more frequent, more burdensome symptoms and a stronger case for professional support; a lower score suggests anxiety has been less troubling recently but does not rule anything out. Symptoms also move with circumstances, so the report reads your result as a current snapshot and a prompt, not a label.

The GAD-7 was developed by Spitzer and colleagues in 2006 as a brief measure for screening and gauging the severity of generalized anxiety in primary care. Despite its brevity, it shows excellent reliability and good sensitivity and specificity against diagnostic interviews, and later studies standardized its severity bands in the general population. It has become one of the most widely used anxiety screeners in the world, translated into many languages.

What it is not is a diagnostic test. An anxiety disorder is diagnosed by a clinical evaluation that considers duration, context, impairment, and other possible explanations - none of which a short screen can capture. A high score is a reason to talk to a professional, not a diagnosis; a low score does not rule out anxiety if you are still struggling. Used here as an educational self-assessment, it is best treated as a starting point for reflection and, where warranted, for support.