Niall Breslin
Bressie is back touring but, as he tells Darragh McManus, he remains focused on his mission to promote positive mental health
Being on stage is probably the most mindful I can be in my life
Niall Breslin, aka Bressie, is back on the road doing his favourite thing, performing live on stage, but as Darragh McManus found out, he remains focused on being a mental health advocate too
Niall Breslin has always been a bit of a Renaissance man, with many balls in the air. As a kid, he played football for Westmeath GAA and rugby for Leinster. Later, he morphed into Bressie, lead singer with The Blizzards, a judge on The Voice of Ireland and one of the country’s best-known mental health activists. These days, he’s a podcaster, recent graduate, record producer and author of children’s books… and, oh yes, the band are back together.
Let’s start with the podcasting. Where is my Mind?, which runs until August 19, is a sixepisode show which aims to help us “navigate the manic, always-on and head-melting world we live in.” Bressie has just finished a two-year Master’s degree in mindfulness, during which he “learned all this amazing information that I thought could be really beneficial for people, if I was able to package it in a way they could really grasp and understand. And the best platform for that was podcasting.”
Despite the trendy connotations, mindfulness is in fact thousands of years old, a part of Buddhist philosophy and meditation practice. Bressie says his course “was heavy on the neuroscience aspect of it: how mindfulness affects the brain.” It’s not just about meditation, but is “a whole way of being – being more in the moment, and less obsessed with the past or future, but to start living in the moment.”
Where is My Mind? covers topics such as social media overload, communication, media literacy, positive thoughts, the inevitability of unhappiness and, perhaps most centrally, getting a proper perspective. That’s addressed in the final show, ‘The pale blue dot’, which Niall describes as “a really amazing” recording in which two astronauts interview each other, “on what it felt like to look back at the Earth and realise how small it is; how everything you’ve ever experienced is there and what that feels like. It’s not about saying how small we are, it’s more like, ‘Guys we don’t have a lot of time here, so let’s get the most out of it.’ When the world feels like it’s suffocating you, no matter how chaotic life can get, there’s a way of stepping outside and looking at it in a different way, and not getting swallowed up by your own thoughts. It’s really powerful to hear these astronauts talking to each other.”
The ultimate message, maybe, can be summarised thus: go easy on yourself. “We’re all struggling,” Bressie adds, “and this podcast is saying, ‘I’m with you. And maybe it’s not your fault.’ All our emphasis, culturally, when it comes to the mind, is that we’ve done something wrong, or there’s something wrong in us.
“This podcast is about the way that culture, society, external factors have this huge influence on us. It’s important to say, maybe there’s nothing wrong with us. We’re just human, we’re struggling to process all of this. Our brains are not designed for this. We talk in the podcast about a thing called the negativity bias, which is what our brain was built with when there were tigers outside the house, and we had to
be overly cautious. You survived if you were cautious, but this negativity bias, which once kept us alive, is now eating us alive.”
The podcasts are “a mixture of things: monologue, interviews with some amazing people, research-based stuff, and attached to each episode is a guided meditation that relates to the content dealt with that week.” There’s a real art to creating a podcast, he adds. “We wanted to create something that wasn’t just loads of information and lists of things to do, but more thought-provoking. I worked with a good friend, Ciara O’Connor, an unbelievable podcast producer. I had the content but needed someone else to structure it for me, have it make sense, with a bit of flow. We don’t just sit behind a mike and talk – we try to create narratives.”
Bressie found his experience of academia “fine”, once he’s interested in the subject, and loves learning and knowledge.
In the meantime, Bressie has just released the sequel to The Magic Moment, which was Ireland’s best-selling picture-book of 2018. In Take Five, young Freddie and the readers learn some important lessons at a birthday party. As for The Blizzards? “We’re a band again, yeah,” he says, “just done a new record. We took a few years out and being back has brought a lovely perspective on what we’re doing. We can’t live without it, it’s really important to us, and being on stage is probably the most mindful I can be in my life. Time stands still when I play – that sounds cheesy – but I adore playing live, being in a band, being creative.
“Last time round, we put untold levels of pressure on ourselves, that we had to achieve success and keep people happy. This time, let’s just enjoy it and see what comes of it. A far more enjoyable approach, I must say.” Bressie is also busy with his own recording studio in Dublin’s Camden Street and going on to complete a PhD is an option too. I have to ask, then, did he ever think when The Blizzards shot to fame with hit single Trust Me I’m a Doctor, that one day Niall Breslin might officially earn that title?
“I’m contemplating the PhD and thinking, will I be able to live with the fact that people will keep shouting that song title at me?” he laughs. “That’s literally becoming the biggest concern about whether I do it: not the funding, not the time, but do I have to listen to this everywhere I go?”