Already an established mental health advocate and speaker, the Blizzards frontman Niall Breslin, better known as Bressie, has taken another turn in his varied career path to write a children's book called The Magic Moment.
"I went back to do my masters in Mindfulness and I got very interested in kid's mindfulness and the stuff that they're dealing with and not dealing with," explains Bressie.
"I really wanted to mould what I was learning around mindfulness and how you can give kids physical cues to deal with being overwhelmed, angry, jealous - these normal emotions that every human being on earth deals with at some stage of their life, yet nobody is really giving us vehicles to deal with them."
Working alongside artist Sheena Dempsey - who also illustrated Jo Simmons' The Dodo Made Me Do It - Bressie created the story of Freddie, a little boy who can't wait to take his first trip to the pool with his dad. Once he gets there, however, he finds it too scary and has to go home. Luckily, Freddie learns a secret trick from his Nana called the 'Magic Moment', a trick that gives kids superpowers when they're facing something scary.
While practising mindfulness may seem like a tall order for most kids, Bressie insists that we underestimate children and their ability to process emotions.
"Their fears and their worries may be something as simple as not liking going to bed at night on their own - simple, whatever, but we have to really value their fears and give them ways of dealing with it."
Once a child learns 'the magic moment trick', the mental health advocate hopes that they will teach their friends and classmates how to do it, something that he believes will allow them to feel empowered.
For parents and teachers, the book acts as a vehicle to discuss negative emotions in a positive way, with language that children will understand.
"Kids don't have the language to describe if they are feeling overwhelmed or anxious - they don't know what it is, they just know it's a feeling that they don't like. Now they have a language and they can communicate with their parents and their parents can communicate with them. I think language is key."
Speaking of language, the author was quick to note that the word 'mindfulness' has been thrown around so much, there are now a lot of misconceptions about the psychological process.
"For me, mindfulness creates a huge amount of awareness about yourself. You can start to figure out what upsets you, what doesn't upset you, what makes you happy - you become really aware and you become objective.
"It allows you to sit with things that you find difficult. Our instinct is to run from them but you can't outrun these things, you can't repress them so it's important to learn the tools to cope and navigate when these things inevitably come up in our life.
Ideally, Bressie would like to see more research and more resources invested into kid's mental health at the primary school level because, logically, if we can learn how to better our mental health at a young age, it can only stand to benefit us later in life.
"If you're talking to kids about how the mind works and how you can settle it at that age, when they hit the teenage years where things can get a bit more difficult and a bit more complicated for them - relationships and all other aspects - they already have a starting point."
The Magic Moment was published by Gill and is on sale now.
