The Swedish holiday that's guaranteed to lower your blood pressure

Am I stressed? It seems an odd question to ask myself. Sure, there have been deadline pressures of late, but not in any way that would cause Woodward and Bernstein to lose sleep. Yes, I have been travelling a fair amount, to outposts as far-flung as Sudan and Ethiopia – but hardly in the nerves’-edge way of Patrick Leigh Fermor, embedded with the Cretan resistance in the Second World War.

Am I tired? Well that much I know. It was an early flight, the before-first-light taxi inching across the torso of London in the sticky black tar of an autumn night; the flight; the long drive at the far end. But worried? Weary? Who can say? And is it really possible for a travel writer to be stressed, anyway? 

It is even stranger to be having this internal discussion in this context, at this hour – 6am, with the new day starting to slither over the surface of Lake Animmen in Sweden.

It comes in stages, a reluctant grey initially, turning to a less bashful silver as the dawn grows in confidence, and finally an exuberant gold as the waking sun breaks the treeline on the opposite bank. The water seems to shiver in pleasure.

I can understand this instinct, and wonder if this vicarious satisfaction is doing much for my own happiness level. It is 14 hours now since the assessment – where my blood pressure was gauged, my heart rate recorded; the first moments of my three days as a guinea pig in a relatively remote part of southern Sweden. 

This location is key. Perhaps more than any other nation, Sweden relishes its connection with nature. It is a love match that is even enshrined in its constitution. Allemansr?tten – The Everyman’s Right – has been written into the Swedish legal fabric since 1994. It is a right to roam freely across the landmass (with a few exceptions – private gardens, in sight of homes, fields under cultivation); to hike, cycle and camp in the jigsaw puzzle of water and whispering branches that defines much of Scandinavia’s largest country. It is a freedom, too, that is intrinsic to the country’s feted sense of wellbeing; to its reputation as a place of quiet and tranquility, where fresh air rouges the cheeks, and gladdens the lungs. 

And it has effectively set me a challenge. The “72 Hour Cabin” project is a simple idea. In an experiment devised by the Karolinska Institutet, a medical university in Stockholm, I am tasked with accepting Sweden’s leafy hug – specifically by staying and sleeping for three nights in a small timber-framed hut in a woodland setting. Alone, with nothing for immediate company beyond the chirp of birdsong and my own thoughts on the scenery about me. And I am defied not to emerge from this process calmer, more relaxed and in a placid state of mind. On this score there is, it transpires, lots of room for improvement. The results of my health check reveal a blood-pressure reading of 151/97 and a pulse of 61 – not exactly signs of a man on the edge yet also hints that I could learn to slow down. 

I am not completely alone in this. We are five in all, we walking case-studies – all with supposedly high-pressure jobs. We are a group which also comprises Steffi, a police officer from Munich, Marilyne, a Parisian taxi driver, and Baqer, an events organiser from New York – as well as the television presenter and adventurer Ben Fogle. Together yet separate, cocooned within our individual cabins, we are supposed to switch off and surrender to our location – Henriksholm, an island some 100 miles north-east of Gothenburg in the fervently forested and distinctly under-populated province of Dalsland. 

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Four miles wide yet barely half a mile across at its broadest, densely gladed in areas yet given over to grassy meadows and antique farm machinery in others – with a large manor house at the top of its east-to-west slope – Henriksholm is easy to surrender to. And while the lake in which it sits, Animmen, is but a puddle compared to Lake V?nern, the biggest in the EU, which spreads out some five miles to the east, the effect is much the same – rippling shallows, an insistent aroma from the pines on its flanks haunting the breeze. It is even a beauty that I can enjoy, as that first dawn seeps in, without raising my head from my pillow. The cabin’s design ensures this. Both its sides and roof are made wholly of perspex – allowing the view outside to resemble a landscape masterpiece in a pale frame. 

In essence, the cabins are a family affair. Henriksholm is owned by Staffan Berger, a former Gothenburg resident who bought it in 1993, bringing his family north away from urban life. The cabins were drawn up by his daughter Jeanna – now an architect back in the city, but inspired by the memories of her childhood. “I was raised on Henriksholm,” she says, “and I wanted to pay homage to typical Dalsland nature. I decided that the cabins would stand on pillars so that I did not leave a permanent footprint. I like to think the people that will stay in them will share this same approach to nature. You can climb up into the cabins just as I used to climb trees here on Henriksholm, when I was a child.” 

I am not, of course, confined to my cabin for the duration of my stay. The plan is for me to be as active as possible in these glorious surroundings. At the south tip of the island, bright orange kayaks are pulled up onto the ancient bedrock of the shore, there for use at any point. To forge out from here is to realise how big the island is – its west side rearing swarthily above the lake, its many millennia of geology visible in layers of rock like piles of untidily stacked newspapers, slumped and tattered in a forgotten library. But a morning on the water is not about racing from one end of Henriksholm to the other. It is about the basic joy of motion, of finding a forward rhythm, of dipping the paddle repeatedly into the water and hearing the gentle plip and drip noises of its entry and exit. A soothing experience. As is an hour in a rowing boat, inching out to check crayfish pots, weighed down and baited to lure these scuttling crustaceans – or a session on foot, ambling along rutted tracks, pine cones crunching under boot, mustard-yellow chantarelle mushrooms growing haphazardly at the base of trunks. There is a sauna, too, behind the main house, where steam and sweat can be alternated with breath-stealing leaps into Animmen’s arms. 

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“I do not miss my previous life. No, not for a moment,” says Andy Van Assema, who runs Sportfishing Dalsland in nearby Ostersbyn. I have been asking him about running an IT company in the Netherlands – an existence he gave up to move to Sweden, to help people to fish. He is trying his best with me. In half an hour, I learn the basics of casting off, watching the spiky lure arc through the air and splash into the lake. We continue for another hour, in a low-slung boat, the many trout and pike in Animmen’s depths spurning my advances – but my failure does not matter. It is, again, about the deceleration of the moment, the unhurried contemplation of space and time. And besides, there is lunch. A feast of crayfish, marinated salmon and zander with asparagus, prepared by Christer and Carin Falkholt – whose local restaurant, Falkholts Dalslandskrog, deals in such banquets. 

It all, though, comes back to the view. My cabin delivers another perspective at night – still looking to the east, but now at the lake shining eerily under a spectral moon. When the clouds smother it, the light vanishes, only to return, having freed itself of its captors, to paint the water a pearly hue once more. The silence as I drift to slumber is almost total, nothing more than the rattle of the boughs overhead, and the lullaby of rain spattering the roof – a friend rather than an irritant when I can see it rather than feel it, each droplet forming, pausing, then bowing to the angle by rolling to the ground. Sleep does not dally.  

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Does any of this lower my levels of stress? After the third night, I plod up to the house to be reappraised. The numbers are conclusive. My blood pressure has shrunk to 138/87; my heart rate has diminished to 56. The statistics are similar across the guinea-pig group – a collective drop in stress of almost 70 per cent; a blood-pressure reduction of, on average, nine per cent. Careful probing of our psyches also establishes a surge in mental positivity – from 3.2 to 3.8 (out of four) on the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), which measures disquiet. And beyond the figures, I can tell that, though I am not quite a man transformed, I have dropped a few gears, tethered my pace, vanquished my velocity.

Staffan passes as I emerge from my reckoning. He explains how he knew Henriksholm as a child, coveted it, and bought it as soon as it came on the market. “It was a boy’s dream,” he says, twinkles in eyes now into their early Seventies. The house is not his permanent residence, he adds (he and his wife Maria live nearby), but a summer refuge. “Sometimes when life is too fast, we come here to escape,” he nods. Perhaps the point is that, whether you live in a cabin, a tent, or a big house on a hill, rustic Sweden has this seductive effect.

How to do it

The five Henriksholm cabins are now available to rent as holiday retreats. A three-night stay costs from SEK3,995 (￡371) per person, based on two sharing, on a full-board basis (visitsweden.com/72hcabin). Four further cabins will be on offer in two other Dalsland locations (see dalslandsaktiviteter.com and baldersnas.eu) from spring 2018. Cabins will be available for single-night stays from next summer.

The manor house on Henriksholm (stenebynas.se/henriksholm), which sleeps up to eight people, is also also available for hire – from SEK40,000 (￡3,720) per week. The price includes towels, linen and use of a rowing boat and canoes.

Half-day fishing trips with Sportfishing Dalsland (sportfishingdalsland.com) cost from SEK3,000 (￡274). Falkholts Dalslandskrog is open for dinner in Asslebyn (falkholt.com).

BA (Heathrow; ba.com), BMI Regional (Birmingham; flybmi.com), Ryanair (Stansted, Edinburgh; ryanair.com) and Norwegian (Gatwick; norwegian.com) all fly to Gothenburg.

Tourist information via visitsweden.com and westsweden.com.