Bressie: ‘I was quite an aggressive person, because I was repressing so much’

Niall Breslin — the musician, podcaster, mental health advocate, charity founder, children’s author, memoirist, TV presenter, entrepreneur and former Leinster rugby player better known as Bressie — realised his work was reaching a new audience when he fell asleep on a plane recently, and woke to find a little girl standing in the aisle beside him.

She was holding her hands out, the thumb and index finger of each hand squeezed together, in an approximation of a yoga mudra, and gazing at him. “I don’t like flying,” she offered, by way of explanation.

Realisation dawned slowly on him. “Are you doing the magic moment?” he asked her, referring to one of his five books for children, each of which teaches a mindfulness technique. His latest, The Sleep Scan, shows children how to do a body scan to help them sleep.

I just wanted to give people something to hold on to at the start and end of the day. It was recorded in my mum’s spare room with two duvets

Breslin suggested to the child they do it together, and afterwards, she trotted happily back to her grateful parents and fell asleep. “Not that I managed to get back to sleep after that,” he grins.

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We’re in the kitchen of the home he bought at the end of lockdown after years of renting, and has been slowly doing up “with very limited DIY skills, because I just couldn’t get people at the time. So I’m waiting for it all to implode and fall in.”

The walls are painted a deep, moody black. Most of the house is black, he says, apart from the vivid Moroccan tiles on the patio outside, which his dad says “you can see from space. I told him that’s the idea.”

His mother was initially appalled at the idea of an entirely black house. “But I said, ‘Mum, we’re two goths, we’re painting the house black.’”

The other goth is his partner, Louize Carroll, a psychologist, his Blizzards bandmate and, you suspect, the reason why most of his recent interviewers comment on how settled and anchored he seems. “I’m great. Like everybody, I’m a bit rinsed by the last couple of years. I haven’t fully processed it yet. I don’t think anyone has. We don’t need to lament on it, but I definitely think there’s elements of it we need to revisit and look at.”

I went to a primary school that wasn’t nice. It was just a really abusive place, where the Christian Brothers at the time weren’t particularly good to the kids

He quotes a line by the poet John O’Donohue: “There’s a place in you where you’ve never been wounded.”

“In the pandemic, we had to go a little deeper and find that. We use the word resilience a lot, and I think sometimes resilience can be overused. There are certain things going on in our world that we really shouldn’t be very resilient to. They’re not normal, they’re really overwhelming and it’s okay to be overwhelmed.”

At the start of the pandemic, he moved in with his parents. “It was incredible experience, and not an experience that I probably would ever have got again.” It meant he was able to be there for his mother when his uncle died very quickly after contracting Covid at the start of the pandemic.

The time he spent living with his parents — along with a deal he signed with Spotify for a twice-daily podcast called Wake Up/Wind Down — also allowed him to become a homeowner at last as he entered his 40s. He was bemused by how quickly that podcast took off, catapulting straight to the top of the US health and fitness charts.

“I just wanted to give people something to hold on to at the start and end of the day. It was recorded in my mum’s spare room with two duvets” on either side of him for sound insulation and “a s**t mic because I didn’t even have a good mic.”

He thinks his “really boring Midlands accent” helped. “People were like, your accent is very good to fall asleep to. Because it’s not really an accent, it’s just a nothing. Apparently even the frequency of it, it’s like 400 hertz…” I think it’s quite soothing, I say. “Nah, it’s boring. It’s like your man in Father Ted.”

Breslin is obviously close to his parents, and refers to them often in conversation. “I had a great childhood, unbelievable parents.”

Music and sport is when I actually felt okay and comfortable. If I didn’t have sport, I wouldn’t have socially connected with anybody. I wouldn’t have had a social life

Nonetheless, he was a worrier. His series of children’s books are partly written with his five-year-old self in mind and, as a result, they’re a relatable and valuable tool for anxious children.

From a young age “there were elements of my childhood that didn’t make sense to me”. His dad, who was in the army, “used to go overseas for, like, six to 12 months at a time”, which he thinks left him with some residual attachment issues. “And then I went to a primary school that wasn’t nice. It was just a really abusive place, where the Christian Brothers at the time weren’t particularly good to the kids. And that stays with you forever. You never lose that.”

The family moved to Israel for a number of months, a period in his life in which his anxiety grew. He had a sense, while they were there, of not being safe. When the family returned to Mullingar, he threw himself into sport and music. “I was a Gaelic player, really. Rugby kind of just came along at a point where I started to become huge.” He is now “six-foot-six without my heels”.

I was deeply confused and frustrated all the time. That was used in a good way when I played rugby

“I was six-foot-five when I was 15. I was pretty socially awkward. Music and sport is when I actually felt okay and comfortable. If I didn’t have sport, I wouldn’t have socially connected with anybody. I wouldn’t have had a social life.”

He found, to his surprise, rugby suited him. “I was quite an aggressive person, because I was repressing so much. When I played rugby, I do feel it was an outlet for me. I was deeply confused and frustrated all the time. That was used in a good way when I played rugby.”

What he now recognises as his first panic attack happened when he was 13. At the time, he didn’t know what it was. He looked his symptoms up in an encyclopedia. “I couldn’t breathe. So I decided it was asthma.”

His panic attacks were visceral and “horrible”. Their physicality was something he later worried might end his career in television (in the event, when he finally opened up about his struggles, the production crew he worked with on The Voice were very understanding.)

It would start with a feeling of vertigo. “Some of the bad ones, I’d always end up retching because I couldn’t breathe. So I retched. And there was a lot of vomiting. My eyes would piss water. They were bloodshot because it was such a forceful thing. It would start slowly. It would last a minute, two minutes, but it was very acute.”

He remembers a sense of confusion and “absolute terror”.

“Because, you know, [panic attacks] have never killed anyone, but that’s all you can think about when you’re going through it. I started associating my bed with it, because I had my first panic attack in bed, so I wouldn’t go to bed. Or I’d end up sleeping in different rooms or trying to fall asleep downstairs.” As a result, he developed insomnia.

[ Bressie: How to teach kids to process life’s negative emotions ]

It was around this time that the Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain died. “And I asked a Christian brother what happened to him — of course, it was suicide. I remember him screaming something incoherent about being a coward. And that’s all I heard. And at the time, I never heard of mental health, so I didn’t know I was experiencing mental health problems. I started to think that I was possessed. I was like, there’s something wrong with me. Am I dying?”

He eventually told his mother that he felt like his skin was crawling constantly.

He hasn’t had a panic attack in five or six years, and says he won’t ever give them the same power over himself. “I can’t tell you how am I going to respond to every last thing that happens to me. But what I do know is that the mantra that stays with me is this will pass.”

The way a lot of us feel sometimes, it’s normal, it’s quite healthy, but we’ve been told for so long that it isn’t, it’s abnormal, and you shouldn’t feel anxious, you shouldn’t be overwhelmed by the chaos that we’re surrounded by

This experience is part of the reason why he wanted to write books that teach children about their emotions. “I don’t call it mindfulness. It’s the language of emotion. What I’m trying to teach kids is how to navigate emotion. I think the way a lot of us feel sometimes, it’s normal, it’s quite healthy, but we’ve been told for so long that it isn’t, it’s abnormal, and you shouldn’t feel anxious, you shouldn’t be overwhelmed by the chaos that we’re surrounded by.”

He has a Master’s degree in Mindfulness Based Interventions, but is increasingly bothered by the way mindfulness has been commoditised; by what one of his university lecturers called “MacMindfulness”.

“It’s being sold as this panacea to solve all your stress. If you get calm from it, that’s a side effect of it. But actually what mindfulness-based interventions is teaching you to do is to become aware of how you’re taking your place in the world, how you’re responding to the world, and how it’s responding to you. The first noble truth of Buddhism,” he says with a slightly self-conscious grin (one of the things that makes him such a good communicator is that he tends to avoid anything that remotely sounds like knit-your-own-hemp mumbo-jumbo), “which is at the core of mindfulness, is that suffering is part of life. And I think the other core piece of mindfulness is the idea of acceptance. Don’t push it away. Be with it. Be curious about it. I think that is ultimately the true power of it.”

We love people in boxes because it makes helps us make sense of the world. What I would say to any young person is never let anyone do that

One of the things he finds perplexing about the digital world is that social media has eroded our capacity for nuance and disagreement. “I think it is really important to stop holding each other to this unsustainable, ridiculously high level of morality that we all try to adhere to. We all f**k up. We all do things and say things” that we might not if we gave it more thought.

What matters, he thinks, “is how we respond to that and how we deal with that. We need to tell our kids that yes, it’s really important to be to be empathetic, to be loving, compassionate, but sometimes you’re not going to be and it’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up. I know what my values are. Do I always absolutely nail them? Absolutely not.”

[ Niall ‘Bressie’ Breslin on anxiety and depression in college ]

Bressie is, in some ways, an odd mix of identities and interests, from shy child to professionally aggressive rugby player to reality TV star to thoughtful commentator on mental health and society. Is there a unifying theme? “The unifying theme is don’t let anyone put you in a box. We love people in boxes because it makes helps us make sense of the world. What I would say to any young person is never let anyone do that. Seek out the things that actually really lift you. And sometimes those things might be great for a year and then, like I did with TV, you’ll decide that’s not what [you] wanted. But everything I’ve ever done has had creativity at the core of it.”

He has never been motivated by money. If he was, he probably would still be making TV programmes, “because I was offered some shows that would have definitely been a huge opportunity”.

If there’s a third theme, I think, it is a relentless curiosity. So I’m not all that surprised to learn that he is finalising a proposal to do a PhD on Ireland’s psychiatric institutions. Why this subject in particular? “In all my work, I’ve realised that it’s the junction of sociology and psychology that I’m most interested in; how culture influenced who we are, and what we are, and how has it influenced how we deal with the world… I think Ireland is an interesting case study, globally. We had the highest [proportion] by a multiple of people in psychiatric hospitals. We just kept putting them in there. And I want to know why. It wasn’t because we had loads of people with mental health issues.”

He’s interested, too, in how shame was used as a weapon. Ireland’s reliance on psychiatric institutions as a means of dealing with poverty and other social issues was not the church’s fault. But “the church weaponised shame. And they gave the gun to us. And we use shame against each other. Unless we have the courage to go back and look into our history really deeply, we’re going to continue to make the same mistakes.”

He admits to being slightly nervous about the level of commitment involved in doing this PhD, both personal and financial. “My career and everything else I was developing will have to take a back seat now, because I have to focus on what is a great and intense commitment.”

I’m not naive enough to think that I can just blindly go through life, but I’m trying to figure it all out

Now 41, he does indeed seem settled and anchored. Does he have a vision for how he’d like to spend the next phase of his life? “No. I’m terrible at that. People say, do you want to be a dad? Of course, yeah. It would be something that…” his voice tails off.

“But I think when you put real stringent, rigid plans together, you can get very disappointed if they don’t align. So I am one of those weirdos who just thinks what will be will be. I’m very much like that.”

[ Bressie: ‘I’d say, “Don’t cry,” but then I’d go upstairs and be upset’ ]

Then again, he adds, “I need to keep some kind of career going so I can fund a five-year PhD. I know in my heart it is what I want to do, but sometimes things happen that you can’t control, and life kicks in, you know? If I became a dad, what would I do then? Now you’ve another responsibility. I’m not naive enough to think that I can just blindly go through life, but I’m trying to figure it all out.”

Then he returns again to a phrase that came up earlier in our conversation, one you suspect he comes back to a lot. “I’ve never put myself in a box.”

The Sleep Scan by Niall Breslin is published by Gill