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An Anxiety Test for Teens—What Is It, and How Does It Help You?

Student anxiety is getting more and more common today, making it the biggest mental health problem the youth is experiencing—along with depression. There are many factors that contribute to the development of anxiety in high school students, but teenagers often feel reluctant to seek professional help.

That is why many psychology websites and mental health organizations make quick, easily accessible anxiety tests for teens. If you have never taken one but feel your anxiety is reaching dangerous levels, you should give them a try. In a short amount of time, you can have a clearer idea of the state of your mental well-being.

Let’s see how anxiety tests for teens work and which ones you can take.

Anxiety Tests for Teenagers

Credit: Rainier Ridao

Anxiety tests consist of a list of questions about the physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety disorders and the degree to which you experience them. You go through the questions, assessing:

Whether you exhibit the common anxiety symptoms
How often you have these symptoms
Whether you should be concerned about them

To give you one example, you may answer if you have experienced trembling in the last month:

Never (or not at all)
Just a little
Several days
Almost every day

The number of questions differs from test to test. For instance, you can answer only several questions or as many as 40. Most anxiety tests don’t take long to complete.

All your answers have a specific score—usually from zero to three. Your answers are then calculated based on those scores. The overall number tells you—in broad terms—if you have:

No anxiety
Minimal anxiety
Mild anxiety
Moderate anxiety
Severe anxiety

Anxiety tests help you determine whether you should be concerned about your anxiety and whether you should seek professional help for it.

You can take your anxiety test online and consult a psychiatrist or other mental health expert to examine your score. If you decide to go to a professional to be clinically diagnosed, they will also give you an anxiety test to complete as part of a diagnostic process.

Other terms for those tests are:

Questionnaires
Quizzes
Screenings

Let’s take a closer look at the:

Main characteristics of anxiety tests
Different types of anxiety disorders the tests are made for
Format of questions and answers found in the tests

Anxiety Tests—What You Have To Know

Credit: Kelly Sikkema

The main characteristics of anxiety tests are that they are:

Free
Easily accessible online
Completed quickly
Clinically evaluated
NOT a substitute for a clinical diagnosis
Anonymous

This list tells you why anxiety tests are useful. You can take them from the comfort of your home at any time you want. You can complete most of them in fewer than five minutes. Some tests that have more questions or require deeper self-reflection can take you longer to finish.

Your identity is also completely hidden when taking an online anxiety test. You can go through the website’s privacy policy before you do the test to make sure your answers are anonymous. For research purposes, the organizations providing the tests can analyze the:

Number of times the tests are submitted
Type of answers given
Demographic of people who take the tests

When it comes to the demographic questions—about your age, gender, or ethnicity—you don’t have to answer them. Your score will not be affected if you don’t provide demographic information.

We must again underline that you can’t diagnose yourself through an anxiety test. Only a licensed mental health expert can determine whether you suffer from an anxiety disorder. The tests are only meant to help you:

Assess the severity of your symptoms
Decide whether to see a doctor

Anxiety Quiz for Teenagers—Different Types

A simple Google search will present you with thousands of anxiety tests you can take. Most of them will have questions related to the general anxiety symptoms, like whether and how often you:

Worry without a real cause
Find yourself in situations where you feel dizzy or nauseous
Are paralyzed by undefined fear for the future
Avoid situations that trigger your anxiety

Tests that consist of general questions about anxiety can—for example—be named a “Do I Need Therapy Quiz” or “Anxiety Test.”

Some organizations offer more specific anxiety tests based on different anxiety disorders and mental health issues. For example, you can take a social anxiety test for teenagers. Find out what social anxiety and other common anxiety disorders are in the table below:

Anxiety Disorder	Characteristics
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)	Experiencing constant worry, fear, and stress about both real and hypothetical events and situations Anticipating all kinds of negative outcomes Fretting to make any decision because of fear and uncertainty
Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD)	Being genuinely afraid of other people’s opinions of you Tending to avoid social situations regularly Exhibiting specific symptoms while interacting, like stammering, blushing, and losing breath
Panic Disorder	Being hit by sudden feelings of deep fear and discomfort Experiencing harmless physical symptoms similar to a heart attack, like light-headedness, racing heartbeat, and fainting Feeling unreal or detached from your environment
Test Anxiety	Being terrified of taking a test or completing an activity, even when you are well-prepared Making up excuses not to go through with the test or activity Suffering acute emotional distress caused by the failure to complete an assignment

Anxiety Quiz for Teens—Question Formats

Broadly speaking, there are two main types of questions in questionnaires:

Open-ended questions—asking you to answer something by explaining or describing it. Your answer can be as short or as long as you want. How you feel about meeting new people, exercising regularly, or going to bed late are open-ended questions
Closed-ended questions—leaving no room for details, this type of questions require short, matter-of-fact answers. For example, “Do you drink coffee?” is a closed-ended question

When your doctor gives you an anxiety test, you can expect both closed-ended and open-ended questions since a real person will assess your answers. The results of online anxiety tests are calculated by a computer, so they consist of closed-ended questions only. These closed-ended questions are formatted in three ways:

Question Format	Meaning	Example
Likert scale	A Likert scale has 5–7 points expressing different levels of agreement or degrees to which something happens. You circle the ones that best describe you or your situation.	Have you felt inexplicably worried during the last month? Not at all︱A little ︱Sometimes︱Often︱Extremely
Yes/No	Yes/No questions in quizzes ask you to express whether the statements are true or not for your situation by circling one of the two answer options. Another similar type is the True/False question.	More days than not, do you feel guilty or useless? Yes︱No
Multiple choice	Multiple choice questions offer several—usually four—answers that you can circle.	When you go to return an item to a store, how do you feel? All right A little uneasy Nervous So anxious that I might not go

How Helpful Are Anxiety Tests for Teenagers?

From January to September 2020, 315,220 people took anxiety and other mental health tests provided by Mental Health America (MHA). This number shows that there are 93% more people who felt the need to screen for anxiety or depression than there were in 2019.

Here are all the relevant findings from the report the non-profit organization did on these tests:

More than 8 in 10 people had the score that showed moderate to severe anxiety symptoms
The age group that scored the most in moderate to severe anxiety symptoms was 11–17, meaning that the youth were found to experience anxiety more than adults
The youth is also more likely to experience suicidal thoughts than adults
Out of 60% of test-takers whose results showed moderate to severe anxiety symptoms, 70% had never been clinically diagnosed

These numbers merit some reflection. They show that anxiety and depression are rising issues. The young who experience feelings of worry and stress are in great danger of developing an anxiety disorder. These same people, aged 11–17, didn’t see a doctor before taking the MHA test.

Since you are a member of the same age demographic, anxiety tests for teens can be helpful to you. They cost you no money, are available at a few clicks, and require only a few minutes of self-reflection to complete. If you do them regularly, you can track your thoughts, feelings, and behavioral patterns to determine whether your mental health is worsening or improving.

If you do the test and find that your results show moderate to severe anxiety levels, taking the test can serve as a wake-up call to seek professional help. Like a physical illness, mental health disorders are also treated more successfully when diagnosed early.

Where Can You Take Anxiety Tests for Teens?

Credit: Nick Morrison

As noted, you can find countless free anxiety tests with a quick Google search, but you can feel confused and overwhelmed by all the choices.

To avoid clicking through various tabs—checking out which organization’s website offers the test for you—check out some of these organizations that offer some of the best anxiety tests:

Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA)
Mental Health America (MHA)
Psychology Today

Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA)

Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) is a non-profit organization committed to:

Raising awareness of mental health disorders
Providing easily accessible and up-to-date information on the issue
Making resources that help people deal with anxiety available to all
Improving the treatment of mental health disorders

On their website, ADAA offers tests for anxiety in general and more specialized ones in case you want to screen for:

Specific phobias
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
Panic disorder
Social anxiety disorder
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)

You can download all the tests in the Word format and use them to assess your anxiety symptoms or take your results to a doctor for clinical evaluation.

Mental Health America (MHA)

Mental Health America—the organization that did the detailed report on mental health screenings we’ve gone through—is another non-profit devoted to helping everyone struggling with anxiety.

On their website, you can:

Learn about the various mental health issues, like anxiety, depression, and self-harming
Chat with people who have the same issues at any time of the day
Read on all kinds of topics related to treatment, from finding an anti-racist, culturally responsive therapist to using specific medication and how it works

Like ADAA, Mental Health America offers different mental health screenings you can do. Besides your anxiety, some of the screenings test the possibility of having:

Depression
A bipolar disorder
Addiction
PTSD

MHA also offers two anxiety tests in Spanish.

Psychology Today

Owned by the American Psychological Association (APA), Psychology Today is a prestige magazine that makes scientific texts on psychology accessible and understandable to regular people.

Like the previous two entries, you can use Psychology Today’s website to find resources on mental health conditions and learn about the treatment methods. You can also read their articles—written by the professionals in the field—on all topics related to your mental well-being, like:

Depression
Chronic disorders
Eating disorders
Passive aggression
Shyness
Relationships
Positive psychology
Goal setting

Psychology Today’s self-tests are varied—for example, you can take the Procrastination or the Listening Skills test. Here are some of their tests that help you assess your mental health:

Psychology Today Self-Test	Time To Complete (Minutes)
Anxiety	10
Social Anxiety	10
Depression	20
Bipolar Depression	5
Mental Health Assessment	15–20
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD)	10–15
Happiness	20

Anxiety Workbooks for Teens

Besides using the websites we have listed, you can also buy an anxiety workbook for teens. An anxiety workbook contains a thorough insight into all anxiety disorders, helping you learn more about them and identify the anxiety symptoms you are having.

The main sections of anxiety workbooks are the ones offering a bunch of practical tools that help you walk through your anxiety daily. You can use the workbook on your own and in consultation with your therapist or another mental health expert. Every workbook uses a slightly different approach to overcoming anxiety. All of them, though, brim with exercises and explanations on how to do each. They are often mental health exercises, meaning you learn how to:

Relax
Meditate
Practice acceptance
Recognize your negative thinking patterns
Build your self-esteem
Deal with anxiety attacks when they occur

What Can You Expect if You Seek Out Help?

Even if you only experience mild anxiety, you can never go wrong by checking in with a mental health expert. If you want to visit a therapist but are afraid to do so, learning about how the process works will relieve your doubts.

The opinion that therapy doesn’t work—and so must be a waste of time and money—is only a myth. It’s similar to the falsehood that anxiety isn’t real. These misconceptions are hurting people who suffer from mental health disorders. They prolong the stigma that surrounds anxiety and similar disorders.

To help you prepare, let’s see what you can expect when you make an appointment:

You have your first session—you are invited to talk freely about anything that is on your mind
The therapist assesses your problem—they can give you written anxiety tests to complete or send you to do physical examinations too
Your therapist advises the method of treatment—they can advise talk therapy, medications, or both (note that if you need medication, you will be referred to a doctor or psychiatrist, as only they can prescribe it)
You decide whether you want to proceed with the assigned treatment—based on the diagnosis you received and the treatment suggestion, you determine whether you want to proceed with the therapy. If you’re not sure about what to do, you can seek an alternative opinion

There are many myths about therapy. Besides the mentioned one, there are also the misbeliefs that therapy is all talk and no action, that you always speak about your childhood, or that therapy can fix all your problems in several sessions.

If you end up having regular sessions, you’ll see that your therapist is involved in your progress actively. For example, they:

Assign homework
Let you decide on the conversation topics in sessions
Help you make peace with and have more control over your anxiety as you grow rather than ‘fix’ you

What Is Your Experience With Teen Anxiety?

Helping teens with anxiety starts with raising awareness about the issue. If you want to contribute to the positive school culture in the school you go to and in all others, why not open up about your experience with anxiety?

Everyone deals with anxiety differently, whether they have clinical anxiety or experience common, everyday stress. By sharing your story, you help normalize the issue, make someone else feel better about their problem, and encourage them to take action.

Whether you have taken any anxiety tests for teens or you’re still considering a visit to a doctor, write to us about what you’re going through. We’ll make your words count by publishing your text on our blog.

Let’s battle teen anxiety together!

Anxiety Test for Teens Explained