How I Actually Spend my Summer in Dubai

The honest version, the love-hate relationship, the adjusted routines, the things that save

me, and why I have made a kind of peace with it

By Molly · The Molly Edit · Dubai Life

Let me be upfront about something.

I have a complicated relationship with Dubai summer.

Not a hate relationship. Not a love relationship. Something messier and more honest than either of those things. A love-hate relationship that shifts depending on the day, the temperature, whether my friends are in town, and how many consecutive days I have been trapped inside with the air conditioning making me ill.

I have spent enough summers in Dubai now to have figured out how to navigate them. Not

perfectly. Not without the occasional afternoon of staring at the ceiling wondering why I live

somewhere that routinely hits 45 degrees. But genuinely, sustainably, without losing my mind.

This post is the honest guide I wish someone had given me. The real routine, the real adjustments, the real tips from someone who actually lives it.

The honest truth about Dubai summer

Before I get into what I actually do, let me say something that the glossy expat content never quite captures.

Dubai summer is hard. The heat is not just hot. It is draining in a way that is difficult to explain until you have experienced it. The kind of heat that makes ambition feel unreasonable and going outside feel like a genuine feat of willpower. Add in the dusty, hazy days that block out the sky, and the air conditioning that chills every indoor space to the point where you end up catching a cold in 45 degree heat, which is its own special kind of irony, and you have a season that takes some real adjustment.

Then there is the social reality. Friends leave. A significant chunk of the people who make your Dubai life rich and full disappear to Europe, to home countries, to wherever the summer takes them. The city empties out in a way that can feel genuinely isolating if you are not prepared for it. It never quite gets easier, no matter how many summers you have been through.

Work slows in most sectors. The relentless 100mph pace of Dubai life, the thing that makes this city so electric from October through April, shifts into something quieter and slower.

But here is the thing. Once you stop fighting the slowness and start leaning into it, once you accept that this is a different season rather than a lesser one, something shifts.

The things I genuinely love about summer here are real, even if they are quiet. Far less traffic. Incredible deals across the city as hotels, restaurants and experiences compete for the people who stayed. A version of Dubai that feels calmer and more spacious than the packed, high-season version.

And above everything else: permission to rest.

Living in Dubai during the busy months is not a small thing. It is full-on, full-speed, relentlessly stimulating. Summer is the city’s way of telling you to slow down. And I have learned, eventually, to listen.

How my routine actually shifts

My day-to-day life in summer looks different to the rest of the year, but perhaps not as dramatically as you might expect. Going outside becomes a strategic decision

I do not go outside in the mornings in summer. Full stop. The morning heat in Dubai from June through September is the kind that drains you entirely for the rest of the day. You step outside at 9am and you feel it in your bones for the next six hours. I learned this the hard way and I do not make the same mistake anymore.

If I need to go outside, really need to, for something that cannot be done from the cool of indoors, it happens at 8pm or later. The evenings in Dubai summer are still warm, but there is something breathable about them. A walk after 8pm, when the sun has gone and the air has lost its edge, is actually manageable and sometimes even lovely.

Fitness moves entirely indoors

My morning walks and any outdoor workouts disappear completely in summer. The treadmill is boring, genuinely, deeply boring compared to walking outside in the cooler months, but it is what it is. I keep my regular fitness classes going without change, because that consistency matters for my energy and my mental health, and indoor classes are perfectly comfortable year-round.

What goes on full pause: camping, boat days, pool days. I know that sounds counterintuitive.

Surely summer is pool season? But when the air temperature is 45 degrees and the pool water is warm enough to be a bath, it loses a lot of its appeal. These are the joys of the cooler months and I save them for then.

Work shifts into planning mode

Here is something I have learned to genuinely love about summer, professionally speaking.

The slower pace is an opportunity. I use summer deliberately for the things that the busy season never leaves enough time for.

Planning out the rest of the year. Upskilling and doing market research, reading, taking courses, staying across what is happening in my industry. Tidying up the admin that has been sitting in a pile since February.

The frantic energy of Q4 in Dubai is extraordinary, but it does not leave much space for thinking. Summer does. And I have started to see that thinking time as one of the most valuable things the season offers, even when it does not feel that way in the moment.

How I keep my mind creative when everything feels flat

I want to be honest here, because I think pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice. Summer genuinely impacts my creativity. The dusty days, the confinement indoors, the reduced social life, the absence of the spontaneous energy that comes from a city fully alive, it takes a toll.

There are weeks in summer where the ideas simply do not flow the way they do in cooler months, and I have had to make my peace with that.

But there are things that help. Really help, not just in theory.

Networking and collaborative meetings

When the usual social spontaneity dries up, I replace it with intentional connection. Coffee

meetings. Collaborative sessions with people whose thinking I find stimulating. Even a good

conversation over a long lunch can unlock a week’s worth of creative momentum.

The people who stay in Dubai for summer are often the most embedded, the most serious about what they are building here. Some of my most interesting professional conversations have happened in the quieter summer months, precisely because the city has slowed enough for people to actually have them.

Reading properly

Not scrolling. Not skimming articles. Actually reading, books, longer essays, things that require sustained attention and reward it.

Summer is the one time of year I consistently read more, and I notice the difference in my thinking and my writing almost immediately. Good books are one of the most reliable sources of new ideas I have found, and summer gives me the time to actually sit with them.

Giving myself genuine grace

This one is perhaps the most important and the least talked about.

Some summers I have fought the slowness. Forced myself to produce at the same rate, pushed through the creative flatness, refused to acknowledge that the season was having an effect on me. It did not work. It just made me resentful and exhausted.

Now I give myself grace. I rest more. I accept that July and August are not my most generative months and I plan accordingly. I do not punish myself for a quieter creative output when the conditions for creativity, stimulation, social energy, the buzz of a city at full capacity, are simply not there.

Resting is not falling behind. Sometimes it is the only way to fuel what comes next.

The things that save me

A few specific things that make Dubai summer genuinely manageable, from someone who has done enough of them to know.

The malls, yes really

I know. It sounds basic. But the malls in Dubai in summer are genuinely one of life’s small

pleasures, and I say that without embarrassment. Cool air, good coffee, interesting shops, the cinema, new restaurants to try, and the specific

pleasure of wandering somewhere beautiful without a destination or a deadline. Grabbing coffee with friends in a beautiful mall cafe is one of the reliable joys of a Dubai summer, and I have learned to embrace it fully rather than feeling like I should be somewhere more interesting.

Some of the best conversations I have had have happened over a long coffee in a mall while it is 47 degrees outside. There is something oddly intimate about it.

Trying new food and restaurants

Food is one of the genuine constants in my Dubai summer. Even when going out feels like effort, even when the heat makes the journey from car to restaurant feel like an expedition, good food is worth it.

I try more new places in summer than any other time of year, partly because the deals are better and partly because there is simply more time. A long dinner with friends who are in town, discovering somewhere new, is one of the small reliable pleasures that punctuates the longer stretches of indoor domesticity. Travelling when I can

I try to get out of Dubai at least once during summer, though it very much depends on what is happening at work and whether being in the city is genuinely necessary. Weddings, work

commitments, the reality of a busy year that does not stop neatly at the beginning of June. It is 50/50 whether I make it out.

When I do travel in summer, even for a short trip, I come back with a different perspective. Cooler air, green spaces, a different pace. It recalibrates everything and makes coming back to Dubai feel exciting rather than claustrophobic.

When I do not travel, the malls and the friends and the long indoor evenings do more than I expect.

The one thing I have genuinely come to love

I said this was a love-hate relationship, and I meant it.

But if I had to name the one thing I genuinely, unambiguously love about Dubai summer it is this. The city slows down. And in slowing down, it gives you something that the rest of the year does not.

Permission.

Permission to rest without guilt. Permission to think without producing. Permission to be a person who is refuelling rather than constantly running at full speed.

Dubai during the busy months is extraordinary, but it is also relentless. One hundred miles an hour, twenty-four hours a day, every day. There is no natural slowdown, no seasonal rhythm that tells you it is okay to breathe.

Summer is that rhythm. And as much as I find it hard, the heat, the friends who leave, the flat

creative days, the cold I inevitably catch from the air conditioning, I have come to see it as the thing that makes the rest of the year possible.

The Q4 energy that Dubai runs on does not appear from nowhere. It is built in the quieter months. In the planning, the resting, the slow accumulation of ideas and energy that happens when the city finally stops demanding everything from you all at once.

Summer in Dubai is not the easy season. But I am not sure the easy seasons are the ones that matter most.

If you are spending your Dubai summer working on your personal brand, using the slower

months to plan, to build and to get ahead, The Molly Edit Course was made for exactly this

moment. Join the waitlist.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly is a marketing strategist, brand consultant and PR professional based in Dubai. She helps founders, creatives and ambitious professionals build personal brands that feel unmistakably theirs. The Molly Edit is her platform for everything personal branding, marketing strategy and Dubai life.