Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Magento 2 layered navigation for categories

I’m having a hard time understanding how to have my categories work as layered navigation options in my sidebar. I see that I can make attribute options such as color appear in my layered navigation if I assign a color attribute to a product. I want the same user experience but for categories and sub-categories.

I have “anchor” turned on for my categories. No category options show in my layered navigation, only attributes. I’m hoping there’s a more simple solution than doing something like creating attributes for every category/sub-category.