The GAD-7 — the clinically validated scale used by doctors and mental health professionals worldwide
Answer honestly about the past two weeks
The GAD-7 is designed to track change over time. Retaking every 2–4 weeks gives a meaningful picture.
The GAD-7 (Generalised Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale) was developed by Robert Spitzer, Kurt Kroenke, Janet Williams, and Bernd Löwe, and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2006. It has since become one of the most widely used anxiety screening instruments in primary care and clinical settings worldwide. The scale asks about the frequency of seven core anxiety symptoms over the past two weeks, with scores ranging from 0 (not at all) to 3 (nearly every day) per item, producing a total score between 0 and 21.
Scores of 5, 10, and 15 represent the established cut-points for mild, moderate, and severe anxiety respectively. A score of 10 or above has a sensitivity of 89% and specificity of 82% for generalised anxiety disorder in clinical populations, making it a reliable screening threshold. However, the GAD-7 is a screening tool — not a diagnostic instrument. A high score indicates that professional evaluation is recommended, not that a diagnosis has been made.
Yukti Labs · yuktilabs.in · Psychology · Self-Knowledge · Inner Science · This tool is for screening purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.
Cognitive distortions are systematic patterns of faulty thinking first catalogued by Aaron Beck in the 1960s and later expanded by David Burns. They are not signs of irrationality — they are the mind's habitual shortcuts, shaped by experience, that reliably generate inaccurate conclusions about the self, the world, and the future.
All-or-nothing thinking · Catastrophising · Mind-reading · Fortune telling · Emotional reasoning · Should statements · Labelling · Personalisation · Mental filtering · Magnification and minimisation. Each has a specific cognitive signature and a specific antidote.
Cognitive distortions persist because they feel true. Emotional reasoning — "I feel it, therefore it must be real" — is particularly powerful because the emotional experience is real, even when the inference drawn from it is not. The distortion is in the interpretation, not the feeling.
Cognitive distortions correspond to Vikshipta and Mudha states of mind in Vedic psychology — the restless-distorted and dull-confused conditions that obscure Viveka (discriminative wisdom). The practice of Svadhyaya (self-study) — which includes honest examination of one's thought patterns — is the classical Vedic approach to what CBT calls cognitive restructuring.
Your identified distortion profile is a map of where your thinking most reliably goes wrong. Awareness precedes change — simply naming the distortion as it arises ("there's the catastrophising again") interrupts the automatic quality of the pattern and creates space for a more accurate assessment.