Her post-tour prescription is refreshingly unfussy: the two-time Grammy winner goes to her local public pool. “A trip to Vesturbæjarlaug for a swim and Kaffi Vest [cafe] afterwards is the best way to restore. It has my favorite steam bath in the world. They also just added new dry and infrared saunas.”
There is a reason people with extremely full, highly visible lives keep washing up here. Iceland is beautiful, obviously. But plenty of places are beautiful. What it does unusually well is make your problems dissipate rather quickly. The landscape is too dramatic, the weather too capricious, the water too cold. You’re forced out of your head and into your body, no matter who you are.
Former Icelandic First Lady Eliza Reid has spent more than a decade bringing literary types here through the Iceland Writers Retreat. She believes the effect goes far beyond scenery. “Iceland is the perfect country for a creative reboot,” says the author of the new memoir The First Lady Next Door. “I have seen time and again how this ethos has helped visitors find peace, perspective and renewed energy.”
I returned to Iceland (my ancestral homeland) this August with a compelling need for all three. I was begrudgingly entering a new decade feeling woefully behind schedule. (For the rest of my mental fracas, you’ll have to read my debut roman à clef, if I ever finish the draft. If my publisher sees this: no, you didn’t.) Suffice to say, I felt as though I had zoomed, scrolled, and sobbed my 30s away through a series of false starts and ego deaths. A tad dramatic? Of course. I’m a Leo. So I marked my birthday by subjecting 15 brave Icelandic girlfriends (and one gung-ho pal from LA) to a ceremonial sauna followed by a chilly North Atlantic swim.
The mountain of Vörðufell.
Photo: Bessa Gaut Friðþjófson
At Sækot, a private seaside hut in Reykjavík’s tony west end, Swimslow founder Erna Bergmann led us through a gusa—an Icelandic ritual of escalating heat, essential oils, music, breathwork, lymphatic massage, meditation and, finally, an ocean plunge. Somewhere between scented steam, running screaming into freezing water, and a glow bar stocked with my Icelandic essentials—BioEffect’s EGF Power potions and marine collagen seltzer by Collab—my existential (and under-eye) baggage ceased to feel terribly urgent.
“We live so much of our lives thinking, planning, performing, processing. Iceland has this incredible ability to interrupt that,” Bergmann says. “You have heat and cold, darkness and endless light, wind, water, geothermal energy and the ocean. There is something about those extremes that makes it almost impossible not to become present.” That word—present—comes up constantly around Icelandic wellness. Not optimization or biohacking, but simply coming back to yourself.
