Anxiety test

Anxiety is a normal response of body and mind to an anticipated threat. The World Health Organization reports that 359 million people were living with an anxiety disorder in 2021, which makes it the most common of all mental disorders. This free self-observation questionnaire puts 20 situations to you, all covering the past two weeks.

When does anxiety become a health matter? When it fires without a proportionate danger, when it lasts, and when it weighs on daily life. Nerves before an exam or an interview belong to a different register: they ease once the situation resolves, and they leave no lasting mark on sleep or on relationships.

What does the questionnaire measure? Four dimensions, five questions each. Worry covers anticipation, rumination and the difficulty of stopping a train of thought. Tension covers physical signs: broken sleep, startling easily, tight muscles, shallow breathing. Avoidance covers what you put in place to reassure yourself, going round a situation, asking for confirmation, checking several times. Impact covers the real effect on work, study, relationships and everyday activities. That last dimension is often the most informative: two people who worry to the same degree can be in very different situations depending on what the anxiety actually costs them.

Why four dimensions rather than a single score? Because one figure does not tell you where to act. Someone whose physical tension is high but whose daily life is intact is not in the same position as someone whose worry is moderate but who has stopped going out. A per-dimension profile makes that difference visible, and it gives you concrete points to describe at an appointment.

Where do the items come from? They were written for Brain Quiz, drawing on the research literature about anxiety. No published scale is reproduced. We explored the ground covered by well-documented short scales, including the GAD-7 published by Robert Spitzer and colleagues in 2006, and the work on worry behind the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, published by Meyer and colleagues in 1990. Reproducing the GAD-7 faithfully would have meant seven items and a single dimension. That is not the format we wanted, and we would rather own a proprietary questionnaire than present a loose adaptation as a published scale.

How is the score calculated? Each answer is worth 0 to 4 points. Questions carry a weight of 1 to 3 depending on their place in their dimension. Two questions per dimension are worded positively and then scored in reverse, to limit answers given out of habit. The total is rescaled to 100 and placed in one of four bands. The weights and the thresholds were set by the Brain Quiz editorial team: they come from no population calibration and no threshold has statistical value.

Why a two-week window? Because that is the period short self-assessment scales usually adopt. It is long enough to look past a single bad day and short enough to stay in accurate memory. Every question covers the same window, which makes the answers comparable and lets you take the questionnaire again in a few weeks to observe a change.

Who is it for? Anyone who wants to put words on what they notice in themselves. Your score and the band text appear immediately, with no account and no payment; the reading of the four dimensions comes with the subscription.

What this questionnaire does not say. It does not separate passing anxiety, tied to a specific situation and easing with it, from a lasting difficulty. It does not look for possible physical causes, a thyroid problem or the effect of a current treatment for instance, which only a medical examination can rule out. Nor does it separate the forms of anxiety from one another: social anxiety, generalised worry and episodes of intense fear follow different patterns. This questionnaire can neither confirm nor rule out a disorder.

What should you do with a high score? Talk to a health professional. Your family doctor can rule out other causes and point you in the right direction, a psychologist can offer support. Anxiety is among the difficulties for which approaches with documented effectiveness exist, and speaking about it early changes what follows. The result is not a verdict, it is a concrete starting point for that conversation: you arrive with four dimensions and specific situations rather than an impression that is hard to put into words.