DON’T forget that you’ve gone through, and are still experiencing a full-scale pandemic that has warped many aspects of your life, and sadly killed millions. And a part of remembering that is allowing yourself to enjoy the simple things — the small details that make up the big picture in order to protect your mental health.

How do you do that? It starts with something as simple as enjoying an ice-cream cone for all its sweetness, shapes and colours, as put by Keisha Bowla-Hines, associate clinical psychologist.

“On the weekend, go and buy yourself a nice ice-cream cone just because you like it and sit and look at the ice-cream, see the colour of it, taste it, feel it, experience it with everything so that on Monday morning when you go to work you remember the ice-cream. We don’t do that —we are always rushing which is why we can’t sleep,” she told reporters during a Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange last week.

Bowla-Hines, as if hinting on exam topics in a room full of school students, added that something as simple as consistent and persistent self-care is invaluable.

“Take a minute to be compassionate to yourself; pat yourself on the back for putting in a good day’s work. At lunch time, actually pause and eat. If it’s half an hour, do nothing but consume your meal. Enjoy it. Don’t tell me lunch was good because it tasted nice. What does that mean? What did you enjoy? What was nice about it?”

Bowla-Hines said self-care is also knowing and making peace with yourself when a day doesn’t go your way.

“Simple self-care can just be realising we’re having a crappy day and acknowledging that we are having a crappy day,” she said.

“We are not designed to smile every day and to get up and just be ‘skinning’ our teeth all the time. We are not like that. We are dynamic beings; some days we are down, some days we are up, but as we continue to practice being authentic with what we feel and how we feel, we get to the balance.”

Moving forward, Bowla-Hines said Jamaicans shouldn’t wait until another pandemic hits to figure out if they will be able to manage it.

“I want us to recognise that another pandemic is possible and that not just a pandemic, but other issues are possible. Other disasters from all angles are possible. How do we, right now, begin to make ourselves resilient and robust enough that should it come on our doorsteps, we are in a better position to begin to contend with what we face? One way to do that is to start very good mental health practices.

”So, something else you should scribble on your to-do list, is practising being more mindful and more intentional. When we ask someone, ‘How are you?’, look in their eyes and check to see if when they say fine, their eyes say fine too because 90 per cent of the time, their eyes don’t say fine. Their eyes say, ‘I wish you would spend a moment to ask me what is really happening’. What I have started to do is when I do ask, I actually say, ‘You don’t have to tell me now if you don’t want to, but I see you’. And that makes a difference for colleagues, for friends, for patients,” she reasoned.

And lastly, don’t forget to greet each other with love.

“These are simple things. We don’t need money; we don’t need training to love each other. Just extend care. Care can simply be ‘good morning’ with a smile.”