Anxiety, panic attacks and intrusive thoughts test Four pictures instead of one score

Free scales answer with one number about one branch — which is why someone with panic attacks scores low on a worry scale and concludes they are fine, while someone with intrusive thoughts finds themselves in no anxiety scale at all. The test lays your answers out across the four pictures that the current classifications describe as separate entries.

• Worry (generalized anxiety) — anxiety about many things at once that cannot be stopped on demand, plus intolerance of uncertainty, tension and sleep;
• Panic attacks — the attack itself, what the body does during it, and what remains between attacks: the wait for the next and a life rebuilt around it;
• Intrusions and rituals — uninvited thoughts, checking and washing, reassurance-seeking, and how real the fear feels;
• Body and health — persistent bodily symptoms, fear of serious illness, and checking: pulse, blood pressure, searching online;
• Separately: anxiety sensitivity — the amplifier explaining why the same sensations frighten one person and not another;
• Separately: avoidance and just-in-case measures — what narrows a life with no new bad event at all;
• Outside the axes: cost in life on three bars, the frame (how long, what else explains it) and two safety items.

A panic attack climbs within minutes and settles within twenty or thirty. Around a quarter of people arriving at an emergency department with chest pain have panic disorder. But the error runs the other way too: supraventricular tachycardia is treated for years as «panic attacks», and a heart attack in its first minutes can look similar. No test — ours or anyone else’s — tells these apart from answers.

So the rule is simple: any first-ever episode deserves an ECG. And there are signs where an ambulance, not a questionnaire, decides: chest pain spreading to the arm, jaw or back with a cold sweat; fainting or nearly fainting; a fast, even pulse above 150 that starts and stops like a switch; breathlessness with blue lips or a fever; weakness in an arm or leg, a drooping face, slurred speech. In those cases the test can wait.

Anxiety is sometimes the consequence rather than the cause, and a questionnaire cannot tell those cases apart. Clinical guidelines for panic disorder explicitly require bodily causes to be excluded before anything is attributed to anxiety.

• The thyroid — at the onset of hyperthyroidism marked anxiety occurs in about four in ten, and sometimes the psychiatric symptom comes first: TSH and free T4;
• Iron deficiency and anaemia — they intensify palpitations and breathlessness: a full blood count with ferritin;
• Heart rhythm disturbances — roughly one supraventricular tachycardia in five is taken for panic disorder: an ECG, with longer monitoring where indicated;
• Low blood sugar — the adrenergic symptoms are indistinguishable from an attack: fasting glucose;
• Caffeine, energy drinks and pre-workout, withdrawal from alcohol or sedatives, heart-racing medication, short sleep, hormonal change — these are history rather than a test, but they are asked about just as routinely.

• The point on the «anxiety in the mind × anxiety in the body» map and the name of the region — free;
• Both axes as bars with zones, and the gap between them — free;
• All four branches with their criteria counts — free;
• The signs where an ambulance, not a test, decides — free;
• A help block with phone numbers if your answers carry risk — free and before any payment;
• The full reading: which picture is closest to you and what that means;
• The criteria of each branch one by one — what is met and exactly what is missing;
• Your own loop link by link and the mechanics of your bodily symptoms;
• What to rule out with a doctor and which tests do it;
• Differentials: how this differs from depression, complex PTSD, autism and ADHD;
• The route: who does what, what to ask for, what to bring;
• A PDF with every number and a chat with an AI that holds your profile.

The test never asks WHAT the frightening thought contains. Only the theme and the frame: uninvited, contradicting who you are, frightening precisely because of that. Such thoughts occur in almost everyone — the difference is not the content but how much meaning is given to it. Asking someone to recount what they are ashamed of, outside a therapeutic relationship, does harm and the profile does not need it.

And the reading never reassures. «You are certainly not dangerous», «your results are normal so everything is fine» — that is exactly what a person with intrusions or health anxiety seeks a dozen times a day: the relief lasts an hour, and the next hour is shorter. Instead of reassurance the reading explains the mechanism. The test neither makes nor excludes a diagnosis, does not overturn a clinician’s decision, prescribes no treatment and names no medication. The thresholds for the criteria are ours rather than clinical cut-offs.