Suppose you have a general tendency to be irrationally terrified of a particular class of thing. Suppose a new specific example of such a thing appears on the horizon.

Is it healthy, I wonder, to avoid even looking at it for fear that you'll be terrified out of your wits? It doesn't sound healthy on the face of it; but it occurs to me that it has one rather encouraging implication, which is that at least at a conscious level you think being reduced to a gibbering jelly for a week at a time by your unreasoning terror is actually more worrying than the thing itself. Which is sort of good news in terms of how bad your unreasoning terror actually is – if it can't override your perfectly reasonable dread of things you've actually had happen to you before, it can't be all that bad.

Of course, on the minus side it might be that the thing turns out to not be nearly as scary as you'd thought, and that you might spend some time failing to find this out in the course of avoiding hearing anything about it. Then you feel silly…