When you know how to use anxiety scales to help you identify your levels of distress, you can better manage your anxiety in the long term. Sometimes you will feel more anxious than at other times. When you have what is called “heightened” anxiety, you might feel quite alone and if you have this problem very frequently or in an ongoing way, you should seek medical attention.
Anxiety
When your doctor is working to diagnose your condition, he might use an anxiety scale in an effort to determine how severe your anxiety disorder is. Anxiety scales are often used when treating anxiety disorders in an effort to determine which treatments are helping and which ones are not.
Types of Anxiety Scales
There are different types of anxiety scales which are used to measure the severity of anxiety in different ways. For instance, the Hamilton Anxiety Scale lists 14 different symptoms which can all be rated from zero to four (zero being not at all). The total score can be up to 56 and it is thought that you should seek treatment for your anxiety if you score higher than 18.
Listed Symptoms
You might be interested to find what the symptoms which are listed include. Anxious moods and worries are at the top of the list of most anxiety scales, while fears (such of those of strangers, places and animals), poor sleeping patterns, feeling dizzy, nauseous, feeling depressed or having trouble sleeping are also listed and can be rated.
With the Beck Anxiety Scale, you will be given a listing of 21 symptoms, which will measure how much you have been worried lately and you can rate them from zero to three. The high score here is 63 and the worse your anxiety disorder, the higher your score will be.
Other anxiety scales will list symptoms such as loss of control, sweating or feeling faint. There is another scale, called the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, which addresses your anxiety from two levels. The first will measure how anxious you feel right now and the other measures how prone to anxiety you usually are. With this list, you will find that there are four types of symptoms and you rate them from one to four. This type of scale is helpful in determining the type of anxiety disorder you might have. For this one you might find symptoms such as low self-esteem, worrying out of habit, lack of motivation and tension.
While an anxiety scale might seem strange, they can actually be very helpful in diagnosing and treating any anxiety disorder, so if you are wondering if you suffer from anxiety or are just having a stressful time in your life right now, checking yourself to see if you have anxiety problems might be a good idea. When you use an anxiety scale online, it is only to serve you as a guideline before seeing your doctor for treatment.
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