Anxiety Rating 61 - 80: High anxiety

Your anxiety is in the high range. You should work to immediately reduce your anxiety and the stress it is causing your body. Early action might prevent the harmful effects of elevated stress. Prompt action might also prevent the establishment of an anxiety disorder.

Additional comments:
Anxiety normally ebbs and flows with life circumstances. Therefore, everyone experiences anxiety to some degree. It’s unrealistic to expect to live a completely anxiety-free life. Anxiety that generally stays within this range, however, can be harmful to your health if it stays within this range for too long.

Since anxiety stresses the body, and a stressed body can become ill and symptomatic if stress is allowed to remain high, it’s wise to keep your anxiety to a minimum and to regularly manage your stress so that your body can remain healthy.

To help reduce the negative effects of anxiety at this level, you may want to begin or increase a routine of regular relaxation and rest, regular mild exercise, eating a healthy diet, getting good sleep, and making more time to play and have fun.

Because anxiety becomes more complex over time, prompt action is required when anxiety reaches this level. Additionally, anxiety sustained at this level often is a precursor to health problems, often plays a role in the establishment of an anxiety disorder, and is commonly a contributing factor to the persistence of an existing anxiety condition once one is established. Promptly addressing anxiety at this level can prevent further health problems and complications associated with long-term elevated anxiety.

The most effective way to address anxiety at this level is with the combination of good self-help information and anxiety counseling. Since many of the factors associated with anxiety at this level are invisible to the sufferer, professional help is generally required to identify and successfully resolve them.

Experiencing anxiety at this level doesn’t mean you have a serious biological mental illness. But it does mean that you have learned to live more fearfully and stressfully than others. As a result, you live more anxiously than others. Professional help can help you understand why you live more fearfully and stressfully than others, and help you learn to live in a healthier way.

While you may be living with high anxiety now, with the right self-help information, help, and support, you can bring your anxiety down into the normal range.