Anxiety test: the free, private GAD-7 self-check

The GAD-7 is a seven-item questionnaire designed to screen for and measure the severity of generalized anxiety disorder. It was published by Robert Spitzer and colleagues in Archives of Internal Medicine in 2006, validated against a sample of more than 2,700 primary-care patients, and has since become one of the most widely used anxiety measures in the world. It is in the public domain, which means clinics, researchers, and tools like this one can use it freely.

Each of the seven items asks how often, over the last two weeks, a specific symptom has bothered you — feeling on edge, not being able to stop worrying, trouble relaxing, irritability, and so on. You answer on a simple four-point scale (not at all, several days, more than half the days, nearly every day), scored 0 to 3. Add the seven items and you get a total from 0 to 21. That number is your GAD-7 score.

What makes the GAD-7 useful is that it was calibrated against structured clinical interviews, so its cut-points actually mean something. At the standard threshold of 10, the questionnaire correctly identifies the majority of people who genuinely have generalized anxiety disorder while keeping false positives reasonably low. It also tracks change well, which is why clinicians often re-administer it every few weeks to see whether treatment is working.

One honest caveat, stated plainly: the GAD-7 was built to detect generalized anxiety. It performs well as a general anxiety screen and also picks up signal for panic disorder, social anxiety, and PTSD, but it is not a substitute for a full evaluation, and it does not screen for depression. This is a screening tool, not a diagnosis. A high score is a prompt to talk to someone qualified — not a verdict.

The GAD-7 maps your 0–21 total onto four severity bands. These cut-points come directly from the validation study (Spitzer et al., 2006) and are the same ones your doctor would use. The key practical line is at 10: a score of 10 or higher is the point at which a professional evaluation is commonly recommended, because that is where the questionnaire best balances catching real cases against false alarms.

Two things worth remembering as you read your number. First, a single score is a snapshot, not a trend. A rough fortnight after a job loss or a breakup can push your score up without meaning you have an anxiety disorder; what clinicians watch for is a pattern that holds across weeks. Second, the number is descriptive, not the whole story. If you scored a calm 3 but still feel that something is genuinely off, trust that feeling and bring it to a professional. The questionnaire is a flashlight, not the territory.

The right next step depends on where your score landed. Here is the calm, evidence-based version for each band — the same logic your result panel above used.

Minimal (0–4) and mild (5–9). Your anxiety is in a range most people can work with using self-care. This is the sweet spot for low-stakes tools: regular sleep, movement, time outdoors, and a couple of techniques you can reach for in the moment. Guided breathing exercises — especially slow, coherent breathing at around 5.5 breaths per minute — are quick to learn and genuinely calming for the body. Pairing breathwork with alpha-wave binaural beats through headphones gives many people a reliable wind-down ritual; you can build a session in the free web generator in about ten seconds. None of this is a cure, and none of it has to be. Keep an eye on how you feel over the next few weeks, and if your score climbs, move up this list.

Moderate (10–14). At this level, anxiety is probably costing you something — sleep, focus, ease with other people. The honest recommendation is to talk to a doctor or therapist. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has the strongest evidence base for anxiety, and a clinician can tell you whether other options, including medication, make sense for you. Self-help tools still belong here, but as adjuncts: breathwork and the non-medication strategies in the anxiety relief hub can steady you between appointments, not replace them. Bring your GAD-7 score to that first conversation — it gives the clinician a useful starting point.

Severe (15–21). A score in this range deserves prompt professional attention. Please reach out to a doctor, therapist, or your country's mental-health services soon rather than waiting it out. If at any point you feel unsafe, hopeless, or that you might harm yourself, contact the crisis line right away — in the US, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, free and available around the clock. Calming tools have their place, but at this level they are a comfort measure while you get real support, not the support itself.

Whatever your band: if anxiety mostly hits you at night, our guide to anxiety when you can't sleep is worth a read; if it spikes in social situations, see binaural beats for social anxiety; and if it ever escalates into a full panic attack, keep how to stop a panic attack bookmarked.

Short answer: they may help a little, as a complementary wellness tool — and that is the most honest framing the evidence supports. Binaural beats are not a treatment, a cure, or a medical device, and they are not a stand-in for therapy or prescribed medication. What they are is a low-risk way to nudge your nervous system toward a calmer state, which some people find genuinely useful alongside real care.

The best single summary of the evidence is a 2019 meta-analysis by Garcia-Argibay, Santed, and Reales (Psychological Research), which pooled 22 studies on cognition, anxiety, and pain. They found a small-to-moderate effect on state anxiety — the in-the-moment kind of anxiety, not a lasting personality trait — while noting wide variation between protocols and people. A frequently cited controlled trial by Padmanabhan and colleagues (Anaesthesia, 2005) gave binaural beats to patients waiting for surgery and reported roughly a 26% reduction in pre-operative anxiety scores versus control. Earlier work, including a small pilot by Wahbeh and colleagues (2007) and a mood-and-vigilance study by Lane and colleagues (1998), points in the same general direction without being definitive.

For anxiety specifically, the band most people reach for is alpha (8–13 Hz), associated with relaxed, eyes-closed wakefulness. The mechanism is not magic — the brain perceives a phantom pulse equal to the difference between two slightly detuned tones, one in each ear, and cortical activity tends to drift toward that rhythm (Oster, Scientific American, 1973). You can read the full mechanism in what binaural beats are, and the practical anxiety playbook lives at our anxiety relief hub.

The responsible bottom line: first-line, evidence-based care — therapy such as CBT, and medication when a clinician prescribes it — is the gold standard for anxiety, and nothing here changes that. Binaural beats and breathwork are adjuncts. Individual response varies, headphones are required, and consistency over a few weeks matters more than any single session. Used that way, with realistic expectations, they are a reasonable thing to add to your toolkit.

This matters enough to spell out. The anxiety test above runs entirely in your browser using plain JavaScript. When you press See my result, your seven answers are added up on your own device and shown back to you. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is saved, and nothing is tracked. There is no account, no email field, no hidden database. Refresh or close the tab and every answer is gone.

The only thing the page records is an anonymous analytics event noting that a GAD-7 was completed and the final 0–21 number — with no answers, no identity, and no way to tie it back to you — so we can see how often the tool is used. If that is more than you want, a tracker blocker or private window stops even that. Your individual responses never leave this device either way. You can take the test as many times as you like, as privately as you like.