If there’s something you’re especially afraid of, you’ve likely heard that the worst thing you can do is to keep avoiding it. It’s only by confronting your fear and learning that it’s safe that you can overcome it – which is actually the basis of ‘exposure therapy’. The problem is, as I’ve discovered, the benefits of exposure can wear off, or you can have a bad experience that brings all the negative associations rushing back.

That’s why I was excited to come across some preliminary research in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy that shows a way to address this – by deliberately weakening your negative memories of what you fear. The key to this is a process called ‘retrieval-induced forgetting’. It’s based on the fact that, when you recall certain aspects of a past experience, it doesn’t just strengthen your memory of those details, it actually weakens your memory of the other aspects that you don’t recall.

In the study, socially anxious participants gave a series of one-minute speeches online. Afterwards, they noted several negative memories (for example, someone yawning) and positive memories (such as someone clapping) from the experience. Next, some of them spent time deliberately recalling only the positive memories. This seemed to weaken their negative memories and, even better, the more this forgetting occurred, the less anxiety they felt about public speaking in the future.

If you’re socially anxious or you have a different fear, you could experiment with this strategy. After facing your fear, spend time deliberately recalling positive aspects of the experience, such as what you enjoyed or something that went well. This isn’t just a case of looking on the bright side – it might actually weaken your negative memories of what happened and help you feel more confident the next time you face your fear.

Many situations in life that are supposed to be fun also involve a high degree of uncertainty: dates with strangers, rollercoasters with unpredictable twists and turns, unrehearsed karaoke. For those of us who like to be able to see what’s coming, many of these potentially enjoyable opportunities may as well have warning signs hanging over them. Sometimes it’s tempting not to take the risk. But I recently came across a study that made me wonder if I should challenge myself more often.

The researchers, including members of the Recreational Fear Lab at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, surveyed visitors to Dystopia Haunted House – one of those immersive attractions where you wander past menacing costumed actors, not knowing what will pop out next. Before they went in, the participants completed some questionnaires, including one tapping their intolerance of uncertainty. (They rated how much they agreed with statements like ‘I can’t stand being taken by surprise’ and ‘Uncertainty keeps me from living a full life’.) As you might expect, visitors who were less tolerant of uncertainty had dimmer expectations about how the haunted house would hit them. They anticipated less positive emotion and more anxious and generally negative emotions than the uncertainty-tolerant did. And yet, afterwards, visitors across the board (including the uncertainty-averse ones) reported feeling more positive emotions and less unpleasant emotions in the haunted house than they predicted they would.

In other words: despite the frightening surprises they’d encountered, it wasn’t so bad after all. It seems that for me and other certainty-craving people, the real problem might not be the ghoul hiding around the corner or the possibility of singing off-key at the karaoke bar, but our pessimism about how it’ll make us feel.