

"Our instinctual brain thinks that a group of people looking at us silently means they are about to eat us," she says in the presentation.

Here are seven cognitive biases that you have to watch out for, according to Hunt:

  1. Catastrophizing — taking an event you are concerned about and blowing it out of proportion
  2. Arbitrary Inference — making a judgment with no supporting information 
  3. Personalization — taking someone else's behavior personally
  4. Selective Abstraction — focusing in on a single negative comment out of many
  5. Overgeneralization — basing future outcomes on current
  6. Dichotomous Thinking — two extremes, no grey area
  7. Labeling — morphing a feeling into a label

Your brain puts itself into a spiral, but you can avoid it by just recognizing when these cognitive disorders pop up. Here's a diagram:

NOW SEE: 61 Behavioral Biases That Screw Up How You Think >