I took the GAD-7 and the score was higher than I expected. Should I be worried?

First, the accurate framing of what you are holding: the GAD-7 is a screening questionnaire, not a diagnostic instrument. It asks about seven symptoms over the past two weeks and totals them. A moderate range means those symptoms were present often enough in that window that a conversation with a clinician is reasonable. It does not mean you have an anxiety disorder, and no questionnaire can establish that — diagnosis requires assessing duration, impairment, context, and what else could be causing it, which is a conversation rather than a form.

Two specific limits that matter for how much weight to give your number. It has a two-week window, so a genuinely bad fortnight scores like a persistent condition and the instrument cannot tell them apart. And it does not know why: worry symptoms come from a thyroid problem, poor sleep, caffeine, a new medication, grief, or a situation that genuinely warrants worry, and all of those produce a moderate score on this scale.

What is worth doing. If the symptoms have been there for months rather than weeks, or they are getting in the way of sleep, work, or people, take the number to a GP — it is genuinely useful information to walk in with and it saves you having to describe everything from scratch. If it was a hard fortnight and you can name why, retaking it in a month tells you more than reasoning about the current score will.

One last thing, said plainly because it is the most likely thing to happen: you are now watching your own anxiety symptoms closely, and that reliably raises them for a while. That is an artefact of having taken the test, not deterioration. If the worry is specifically about the score itself, that is worth noticing as its own finding — and if things ever get to the point of thoughts of harming yourself, that is the moment to contact a crisis line or your doctor the same day rather than filling in another questionnaire.