... and you can use trick of copying your .git directory somewhere safe before doing that in case you mess it up, since copying it back to overwrite your mistak

... and you can use trick of copying your .git directory somewhere safe before doing that in case you mess it up, since copying it back to overwrite your mistake is almost always faster than figuring out the "right" way to fix any given mistake, unless you have a really big repo or a really slow disk. :-)