Fight fans knew why Sean O’Malley planned a “detox” for 2025 coming off his title loss to Merab Dvalishvili back at UFC 306, but they didn’t expect him to actually give up smoking marijuana. After all, it’s a difficult habit to quit.
Back in December, O’Malley announced that he would be stepping back from a few things in his life that were taking away from fatherhood and fighting. This mostly included his social media obligations, which became too much to handle after O’Malley became UFC’s bantamweight champion back in 2023. He was, and still is, one of the biggest names on the UFC roster.
With his title rematch against Dvalishvili booked for next weekend at UFC 316 in Newark, New Jersey, “Suga” is hoping all of his efforts over the past six months have paid off. O’Malley swears he’s been “high on life” since cutting out some time-consuming habits, but it has yet to be seen if that will have any effect on his performance inside of the cage.
“There are not a whole lot of things you can probably say are ‘life-changing’ but I would say me getting off of my social media—they’re still running, we’re still making content, I still have a team doing that stuff—but for me to actually not get on my phone, get on Instagram, get on Snapchat, get on Twitter, engage with the virtual reality every single day, hours a day, has completely changed my life in a positive way,” said O’Malley during a recent interview with Jim Rome (h/t MMA Fighting). “I don’t have any desire to get back on.
“I didn’t do this so I can beat Merab. I didn’t get off social media and stop doing this, stop doing that, so I can beat Merab. I did for my own peace of mind. I never really had anxiety. Everyone has a low level of anxiety. But getting off social media, not opening up my phone all the time, that pretty much eliminated it. I feel like it was definitely worth doing.”
In addition to jumping off social media, O’Malley has done his best to abstain from smoking weed. This was a bit surprising considering some of O’Malley’s early popularity stemmed from him smoking marijuana, creating his own strain, braiding his hair into a leaf and so on. The former UFC champion doesn’t think he’s done toking the Mary Jane forever, but it has helped keep his mind clear.
“I don’t think I’ve even smoked this year. I might have,” O’Malley said. “That was another thing. I’m not done smoking weed forever. I definitely enjoy it, but it was kind of just giving me this anxiety I didn’t really want. I don’t know if it was a mixture between the social media and then smoking, it was just something in me was saying, ‘Hey, let’s take a [break]. We’re stopping social media, we’re stopping this, we’re stopping that, let’s take a little break from it.’ And that also feels really good.”
Thoughts on all of this?
