When you want to know the temperature in the room, you might reach for a thermometer. The SUDS (Subjective Units of Distress) scale is an example of a tool that helps you to measure your anxiety – think of it as a thermometer to gauge your mood! It’s beneficial for helping you feel greater control of your anxiety disorder and panic attacks so they don’t take over your life. But how does it work?
The SUDS scale allows you to rate your anxiety from 0 to 10. This distress scale is useful for therapists during sessions with patients as it helps them rate their anxiety and can measure anxious responses over time.
Here we answer all your questions about the SUDS scale and how it works.
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What is a SUDS scale?
Joseph Wolpe created the SUDS scale. Traditionally, the SUDS scale had 100 points on it, with every 10 points representing a level of anxiety. The scale starts at 0, representing feelings of calm and no anxiety, and ends at 100, representing feelings of distress. Here’s what all the points on the SUDS score mean.
| Level | Description |
|---|---|
| 0 | Relaxed |
| 10 | Alert and awake |
| 20 | Minimal anxiety |
| 30 | Mild anxiety that’s not interfering with one’s day |
| 40 | Mild to moderate levels of anxiety |
| 50 | Moderate anxiety, but it doesn’t interfere with one’s daily life |
| 70 | Feeling quite anxious, and it’s interfering with one’s performance or life |
| 80 | Very anxious and struggling to concentrate |
| 90 | Extremely anxious/distressed |
Wolpe also proposed a 0-10 SUDS scale that’s a simplified version for greater convenience and ease of use.
How to use the distress scale
If you’ve ever been in therapy for an anxiety disorder, your therapist might have asked you to rate the intensity of your emotions, such as during a panic attack. This is a way of helping you to feel more in control of the situation. Rating the severity of your anxiety, such as from a scale of 0 to 100 (or 0-10), can help you to observe it and notice how it changes.
You can use the SUDS scale outside of therapy sessions to gain control of your anxiety. When you feel distressing symptoms of a panic attack coming on, such as a racing heart and breathlessness, you can rate the anxiety and then decrease the rating as you start to feel better, which could occur within a few minutes. This helps you to notice the pattern of your feelings.
During therapy, a therapist can use the SUDS scale to help patients rate their distress level. It is even more useful when combined with asking the patient questions to help them monitor their anxiety. Examples of questions to use with the SUDS rating include:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how anxious are you?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do your thoughts contribute to your anxiety?
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How the disturbance scale is used in therapy
The SUDS rating scale is useful for exposure therapy, enabling therapists to gauge their patients’ anxiety over time. Exposure therapy is psychological treatment in which a therapist helps patients expose themselves to their fear safely so that they can stop avoiding it and decrease their level of anxiety.
The SUDS scale helps patients to see how they’re dealing with their fear and how their anxiety changes before and after exposure to a phobia. For example, someone with arachnophobia could rate their anxiety before, during, and after being in a room with a large spider. On a scale of 1 to 10, their anxiety could be at seven before and nine during the exposure, then decrease to 2 or 1 afterward.
Although it might not always measure how much anxiety you’re feeling, the SUDS scale can help you become more aware of your anxiety. In this way, it’s a great self-report on your anxiety.
How the SUDS scale can relieve anxiety
The SUDS scale can show you your progress during exposure therapy by measuring your anxiety levels. It can also help you become in tune with your emotions and their severity. You’ll be able to observe your feelings when they’re intense or calm, and with practice, this will enable you to pick up on triggers that cause the fluctuations. This is also useful when tracking your anxiety at home, such as journaling.
You’ll also gain a bit more perspective on your feelings. You might be feeling anxious, and it could be worrying you, but if you rate it at 4 out of 10, this can make you feel that you can deal with it – it’s not as bad as 10!
Without a scale to measure anxiety, you might think of extremes, such as feeling “calm” or “anxious,” but there are different anxiety levels. Expressing your feelings, such as stating, “I feel very anxious,” can be limited. A rating system can therefore be more useful.
Reasons to use distress scale subjective units for anxiety
The SUDS scale offers many benefits for patients and clients. These include the following:
- It’s easy to understand and use. Patients can use the scale wherever they are without being limited to using it in a therapeutic session with a professional.
- It can be used once or over time to measure one’s progress in therapy.
- It can be used with other tools or methods. For example, you can use a SUDS scale for anxiety with a questionnaire to help patients better understand what they’re feeling and how it affects them.
Possible limitations of the SUDS scale
Although the SUDS scale has many benefits, there are some limitations that therapists should know about.
- The SUDS scale is subjective. Different people using the scale could interpret it differently. How you rate your anxiety at a specific moment can also be affected by factors such as your general mood or environment.
- The SUDS scale is simple. Although its simplicity makes it easy to use, the SUDS scale can only give you a rating for the intensity of your anxiety symptoms. It can’t provide you with information about the greater complexity of anxiety.
Conclusion
The SUDS scale for anxiety is useful for patients and therapists alike. It can help someone rate their anxiety (or the intensity of their feelings), enabling them to better understand their feelings and anxious patterns during treatment.
