stress test
Twenty-one questions about the past week, about three minutes. The DASS-21 is a scale clinicians use, and it measures three things at once — stress among them, counted separately from anxiety.
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0 of 21 answered — the result appears on its own once everything is answered
your result
0 of 42
- anxiety — anxiety test
- low mood — depression test
The questionnaire measures three things at once, so anxiety and low mood are scored here too. Each has its own reading.
about this questionnaire
The DASS-21 comes from Syd and Peter Lovibond at the University of New South Wales. It is the short form of a forty-two-item scale and measures three states at once: stress, anxiety and low mood. The separation is the point. Stress here is being revved up — trouble winding down, irritability, reactions bigger than their cause; anxiety is fear and what the body does with it. People confuse the two, and they need different help.
The scale is free for anyone to use — its authors put it in the public domain.
The lines between levels are arbitrary. The authors were wary of publishing them at all, so that a label like "severe" doesn’t harden into a diagnosis: the numbers come from how answers are distributed, not from a line where illness begins. A 26 and a 24 differ by one answer, not by a state.
short answers
- What is the difference between stress and anxiety?
- Stress on this scale is about being revved up: hard to relax, everything irritating, reactions larger than their cause. Anxiety is fear and the body — dry mouth, trembling, a heart you can feel, the sense that something bad is about to happen. They travel together often, and they come down by different routes.
- Is this a diagnosis?
- No. The questionnaire shows how heavy one particular week was. A diagnosis comes from a doctor, after a conversation about how long this has gone on, in what circumstances, and what else is happening in your body.
- Why does it ask about the past week?
- That is how the scale is built: it measures a state, not a character. In a hard stretch the score will be higher, and that is expected — a month later it may be different.
- Does breathing help with stress?
- Yes, and this is where our evidence is strongest. A meta-analysis of twenty-four heart-rate-variability biofeedback studies found a large drop in self-reported stress and anxiety. One caveat: those studies used a device showing people their own pulse, while we set a rhythm, so it isn’t quite the same thing.
- Where do the answers go?
- Nowhere. Everything is scored in your browser: no answer and no result reaches a server, there is no sign-up, and the result disappears with the tab. Like any site, we run web analytics; what it collects is set out in the privacy policy.
read next
how to deal with stress how to calm down resonance breathing
what we read
- Lovibond S.H., Lovibond P.F. The structure of negative emotional states: comparison of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) with the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 1995 — the original publication of the scale. pubmed
- Goessl V.C., Curtiss J.E., Hofmann S.G. The effect of heart rate variability biofeedback training on stress and anxiety: a meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine, 2017 — 24 studies, 484 participants, Hedges g = 0.83 against control. pubmed
On this scale the week was a calm one. Whatever tension came up didn’t stay long and didn’t get in the way.
A steady rhythm is still worth doing here. Five minutes a day trains the thing that keeps this number low: coming back to yourself quickly.
The tension is noticeable and still bearable: harder to unwind than usual, a shorter fuse, evenings that take a while to let go.
Regularity is what pays off at this level. Once a day, at the same hour, so the body has somewhere to return to and you aren’t hunting for it once things have already tipped.
The week was tense enough for other people to notice: harder to settle, quicker to snap, and starting a task takes as much out of you as dropping one.
Five minutes of an even rhythm takes the edge off in the moment, and of everything you can do without a specialist, it is the best-tested. If this level holds for months, it is worth finding out what keeps it there — a conversation with a specialist is a shorter road than any practice.
This is a lot. At this level tension eats sleep, attention and patience, and by this point most people already know they aren’t coping.
Start with the fastest thing: two physiological sighs, then an even rhythm. After that it is worth reaching someone who can work on the cause — at this number, breathing on its own rarely gets you through.
The top of the scale. This is what running on empty looks like: the body won’t stand down, small things set you off, and rest doesn’t restore anything.
Breathing is still worth doing — it is available right now and works in minutes. At this level it isn’t enough on its own, and this is the point to ask someone for help: the longer it holds, the more it costs the body.