How to safely restart Scheduled reminders
I have made the same mistake myself, more than once - ugh! To avoid emails being sent when a scheduled job needs to catch up on backlog:

Switch from production to staging mode
Manually execute the schedule reminders job - this will result in an activity being recorded on the participant's contact record, but will not send the email (the desired impact)
Switch back to production - the activities recorded on the participant's contact record will prevent schedule reminders being sent for the same events

Hope this helps!
Tamar