Having any amount of anxiety can make it hard to get through the day. It takes more energy to function when you’re distracted with worries and fears. Even if you can still go about your usual routine, you may find yourself feeling exhausted and fatigued.

If you can measure the severity of your anxiety, you’ll have a baseline to determine which treatments are helpful and which ones aren’t working for you. It’s less about making judgments or comparisons and more about getting an accurate idea of how your life is affected. This way you can determine which level of treatment to start with and when it’s time to increase or reduce your treatments.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the different levels of anxiety, from mild to moderate and severe, and how they can be measured.

What does it mean to have mild, moderate or severe anxiety?

The different levels of anxiety may describe the severity of your symptoms and the degree to which they affect different areas of your life. How often you notice anxiety symptoms can be an important factor, as well as your access to effective treatment and your engagement with your treatment process. People with a panic disorder may have severe symptoms, but only in certain situations. People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may have anxiety on most days that gets more manageable with the right treatment. People with either of these conditions and others like generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) can experience the full spectrum of mild, moderate and severe anxiety at different times.

What does mild, moderate or severe anxiety look and feel like?

People with anxiety disorders notice the same types of symptoms, whether they’re mild, moderate or severe. The differences are the number, the frequency and the intensity of the symptoms they’re experiencing. Almost all anxiety disorders involve intense worries or fears about something that may happen. These feelings can affect a person’s mood and cognitive function, making them irritable or impairing their ability to concentrate or make decisions. Physical symptoms like tension, sweating, upset stomach, trembling and difficulty sleeping are common with any level of anxiety.

Some of the most common anxiety symptoms include:

• A sense of worry, fear or dread, either in general or connected to specific triggers
• A sense of impending danger, panic or doom
• Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
• Irritability
• Tension or restlessness
• Nausea or gastrointestinal symptoms
• Heart palpitations
• Sweating, trembling or shaking
• Difficulty sleeping

How can we measure anxiety symptoms?

To get an accurate idea of how severe your anxiety symptoms are, you’ll need to work with a licensed clinician. Clinicians may use self-assessment tools like the GAD-7 to monitor their clients’ anxiety symptoms. You’ll rate different anxiety symptoms based on how frequently you notice them and how much they interfere with life activities like working or socializing. Your therapist or psychiatrist can help you interpret the results and factor in any conditions or symptoms that aren’t covered in the assessment.

A survey published in 2023 revealed that people don’t always have a clear picture of their own anxiety symptoms. Participants were asked whether they had experienced anxiety symptoms in the past year and whether they had received a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder. They also filled out a GAD-7 questionnaire. Of those who answered yes to the questions about having an anxiety disorder, 40% had no anxiety symptoms or minimal symptoms, 49% had mild to moderate anxiety symptoms, and 11% had severe anxiety symptoms. The results also showed that 11.5% of people experience mild to severe anxiety symptoms, but they don’t recognize them as such.

The following profiles of anxiety symptoms align with scoring on the GAD-7:

Minimal anxiety — A few symptoms that occur several days in a two-week period that don’t generally affect life activities

Mild anxiety — Several symptoms that occur up to half of the days in a two-week period or more, which may affect certain life activities

Moderate anxiety — Several symptoms that occur more than half of the days in a two-week period or nearly every day, which make activities difficult in more than one area of life

Severe anxiety — More than five symptoms that occur nearly every day, making it extremely difficult to function

Get help with moderate to severe anxiety symptoms at Lightfully

When left untreated, anxiety can affect your career and personal life as well as your physical health. The emotional, cognitive and physical symptoms of anxiety rarely go away on their own. However, there are effective treatments that can help you learn to manage your anxiety or potentially reduce your symptoms. Most people with moderate to severe anxiety need a combination of medication and therapy to manage their symptoms. If your anxiety is impacting your ability to function, you may need a higher level of mental health treatment.

At Lightfully, we help people change their relationships to their anxieties and fears. Our compassionate licensed clinicians help our clients understand where their anxious thoughts are coming from and gain a more balanced perspective. We also help our clients learn healthy ways to cope and self-soothe in moments when they’re feeling distressed.

Are you looking for a new approach to treating moderate to severe anxiety? Contact us to learn more and ask questions about our process. Let’s explore some new ways to manage your anxiety symptoms together.