At work, Molly ‘Meatball’ McCann gets more fists to the face than I get emails in any one shift. To her credit, her response rate is significantly higher than mine, and all while under the analytical eye of hundreds of thousands of spectators too. You’d imagine the pressure is insurmountable and, for many, it absolutely – and understandably – would be. But life’s thrown more than limbs at McCann.

“I’ve managed to come through a lot of [tragedy] in my life,” the mixed martial artist and UFC fighter tells Strong Women with characteristic candour. Her upbringing, she says, wasn’t very stable; she grew up in poverty, sometimes not knowing where her next meal was coming from, and watched her mum battle addiction. “It was a tough period of my life, but it absolutely made me who I am today, and I wouldn’t change that.” 

It was during this time that she first learned she has ADHD. “As a young child, people didn’t know if I had PTSD or what I was dealing with – why I was struggling to retain stuff and why I couldn’t sit still. I struggle to not move,” she says, pointing out that she’s fidgeted with her fingers and oscillated between sitting positions throughout our chat. “I think I was first diagnosed at six. 

“At school, we weren’t taught to understand subjects… we were simply taught to remember information. I was really struggling; academically, I wasn’t that switched on because I wasn’t being taught in a manner that I could take on.”

To expose her to different teaching styles and provide an outlet for her energy, McCann’s mum enrolled her in sports. “I was then able to transfer skills,” she recalls. “You wouldn’t have to tell me how to play basketball – I’d watch a game and could do it. I wasn’t allowed in boxing gyms so I stood outside to watch what they do, and could just do it.” Sport, even at such a young age, afforded McCann an invaluable insight into her learning style that many of us don’t discover until much later in life – if at all: “I learned from watching, not by being spoken to.”

Being diagnosed so young, and at a time when information and resources for neurodivergent people weren’t easily accessible, meant that McCann probably didn’t receive the level of support she needed as a child in order to fully understand ADHD and how it affects her. As a result, her diagnosis slipped to the back of her mind, until she went to uni, she says. “I remember being a fresher and one of my lecturers said, ‘Have you got ADHD?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know.’” A second test, prompted by her lecturer, confirmed that McCann is neurodivergent. “I didn’t really do anything with it because I was just thinking about going out, getting drunk and just passing my exams. I was like, ‘Whatever – I don’t need an extra half an hour to finish an assignment or a test,’ thinking that’s all it was.” It wasn’t until she was catapulted to fame following a series of big fights that she really started to take her diagnosis and her symptoms seriously.

As McCann’s career progressed, she became increasingly aware of how ADHD affected her performance and her life. “In the cage, I can break down an opponent’s fighting style like that,” she says, snapping her fingers, “and combat it. But sometimes, if I’m overly stimulated and I’ve got a lot of information coming at me, I can’t break it down. I had to do a lot of work on understanding what my limitations are and how I can be a better person.” She’s not implying that ADHD somehow made her a worse human; rather, some of the behaviours it enabled were sometimes detrimental to her wellbeing and her relationships.

“Life is seasonal,” she says of living with ADHD. “You’re either all in or all out. I’m like, why am I so high, walking on clouds, and then two weeks later I’m lower than the road? I just had to learn that: when I’m feeling elation and joy, don’t burn it all out.”

When it came to romantic relationships, McCann says she previously “couldn’t get past a year or two because once I realised the dopamine had stopped, I’d look for it in something else and then the relationship would struggle and break down. I learned that you have to kind of stick that bit out, but no matter what this pattern is always coming.”

Understanding how her mind works and getting to grips with her mental health has been a difficult and, at times, agonising process for McCann. Last year, while navigating her growing profile and the anxiety that came with it, she experienced a big knock to her mental wellbeing. “The more known I got, the higher the pressure became, and there was no time to rest my mind and my body – it was like I’d been dropped in a fish bowl. The light never goes off and I’m constantly awake. And then I just kind of broke down,” she says. 

“I was having loads of dreams about taking my own life. I just remember waking up one day and I couldn’t stop crying. I rang my mum and I said: ‘You’re gonna have to come up – I’m not getting past this nightmare.’ Nothing wrong had happened; I was living the life of my wildest dreams on paper, but it was just not what I had envisioned it to be.”

With the support of her mum and fiancée, and despite a lifetime of soldiering on when what she really needed was rest, McCann committed to prioritising her health and her peace for the first time. “I had to take a break and realise what’s real and what’s not,” she says. “My mum told me what I needed to do. She said, ‘If you don’t fight again tomorrow, Molly, you’ve overachieved anyway.’ I just remember waking up every day and forcing myself to rest and get myself through those moments. The anxiety was ruthless – it made me understand why people just have enough.” 

She developed a mental health toolbox of practices to help her through the darkest days and made some big changes to the way she lives her life. “I really worked on breathwork, and I worked on meditation,” she says. “I took things out of my life that were giving me anxiety, like being in big crowds.” She took a break from social media, too. “It was a lot of self-care and a lot of work.”

Along with her mental health, McCann now has a better understanding of the role ADHD plays in her life and how to harness her strengths. “I spoke to a sports psychologist who has ADHD and that really helped,” she says. “There’s so much positive to what I’ve got going on, but it’s just learning the tools. As if it’s taken 32 years to understand myself!” 

One of the positives, McCann has come to learn, is that hyperfocus – a symptom commonly associated with ADHD – can come in handy when you’re working towards an imposing objective.

Like many elite athletes, McCann is a goal-setter – she doesn’t shy away from dreaming big. Every morning, she pens her mantra (“I’m too fast, I’m too strong, I’m too fucking good. I’m powerful beyond measure, and anyone’s life I touch I change”), lists the things she’s grateful for and journals her goals: both short-term, for specific upcoming fights, and long-term, looking to the three or four years ahead. 

“When I was five or six, my mum would make me say my prayers before bed and list three things I’m thankful for. I always set my goals from a young age,” she says. “Mum would ask, ‘What are you going to do this week?’ or, if I was playing football, ‘How many goals are you going to score?’” 

While the goal-getter mindset has been drummed into her from a young age, it’s the hyperfocus, in part, that’s enabled McCann to achieve them. “We’re talking about goal-setting, but a large majority of that is just having ADHD – the single-minded focus on ‘I’m going to make sure that happens’, and the creativity that comes with it.” 

This hyperfocus, she continues, helps to remove distractions when she’s working towards a goal. “It’s like, ‘This is my goal; I’m not going to feel fulfilled until I reach it.’ There are a lot of positives; you’ve just got to understand what your limitations are.”

McCann has a rigorous and regimented routine that both helps her manage ADHD symptoms and work towards her ultimate goal – winning big fights. But it’s in the cage, in front of a crowd, that she feels most centred. She’s currently training for UFC Fight Night on the 22 July, where she’ll come up against fellow flyweight Julija Stoliarenko. “As I’m walking to the cage, I feel as though I’m unshackling the everyday mundane stuff that I struggle with,” she says. “Then, when I’m in there, it’s like my truest form of expression, and I just get to be. And, as long as I’m in a flow state and positive, greatness happens.”

Images: Getty