Few in the wellness industry can lay claim to a career as accomplished as Anna Bjurstam, who co-founded Raison d’Être (200-plus spas across 70 countries), LivNordic (one of the leading cruise wellness brands), and RoseBar Longevity at Six Senses Ibiza and served as wellness pioneer at Six Senses Hotels Resorts Spas from 2013 to 2026. A founding board member of the Global Wellness Summit, she has helped shape the industry’s most important conversations since the organization’s inception. She is an angel investor in wellness and longevity ventures, a trained shamanic practitioner, and an international keynote speaker.
Bjurstam also holds a master’s degree in finance and is currently publishing The Expert Crisis in Longevity, a series examining who is actually qualified to guide people in the longevity era, and what the industry needs to do to close the gap between science and practice. If that’s not impressive enough, she recently launched Wahayla, a company that builds wellness, longevity, and performance environments for hotels, medical and longevity clinics, fitness companies, cruise and maritime wellness brands, corporations, and membership clubs.
“After more than three decades in wellness, I started asking myself an uncomfortable question: we have become incredibly sophisticated at optimizing the human body, but are we actually becoming better at helping people feel alive?” says Bjurstam. “We measure everything. Sleep, glucose, HRV, biological age, VO2 max. All useful. But human beings aren’t only a collection of biomarkers.” According to Bjurstam, her own life has always blurred the lines. Although she has a business and finance background, she has also spent decades in wellness and longevity science.
“For a long time, the industry wanted those worlds separated,” says Bjurstam. “I no longer think they should be. Wahayla was born from that intersection: wellness, longevity, and consciousness; science and soul; the measurable and the invisible. I want to explore what happens when we stop treating those as competing ideas and start looking at the whole human being.” Here, she shares her philosophy guiding this new endeavor.
What does wellness mean to you?
Wellness, to me, is the ability to feel fully alive and that goes far beyond having good biomarkers. I have spent more than 30 years exploring wellness from very different perspectives: fitness and longevity science, but also meditation, shamanism, energy medicine, and spiritual practices. What I have learned is that we are biological beings, but we are also emotional, energetic, and spiritual beings.
You can optimize your glucose, HRV, sleep, and biological age and still not feel well. Equally, I don’t believe we should use spirituality as an excuse to ignore our biology. For me, real wellness is where science and soul meet: caring for the physical body while also tending to our nervous system, energy, relationships, purpose, connection to nature, and whatever connects us to something larger than ourselves.
What are your favorite things to do to maintain your personal wellbeing?
I probably do more than most, because longevity is both my work and one of my great passions. I strength train, meditate, prioritize sleep, spend time in nature, and use longevity technologies including red light and other biohacking modalities. I also pay attention to HRV and resting heart rate because they give me valuable information about recovery, stress, and how hard I should push—or not push—on a particular day.
I believe that in today’s world we also need to understand some of the biology of aging: autophagy, the body’s natural cellular recycling and cleanup system: senescent cells, also known as damaged or aging cells that have stopped dividing but remain metabolically active; mitochondrial function; and hormesis, a biological phenomenon in which a low-dose stressor that is harmful in high amounts produces a beneficial or adaptive response in cells and organisms, for example, and how our everyday choices can influence these processes.
But I balance all of that science with practices that are much harder to quantify. I have worked with shamanism, meditation, and energy medicine for decades. I spend time in nature, connect to the elements, and try to listen to my intuition as much as I listen to my data. For me, the sweet spot is using technology to understand the body without allowing technology to become the authority over it.
What is your favorite fitness activity?
Strength training. Maintaining muscle is one of the most important things we can do as we age, and I think women in particular have historically underestimated its importance.
But I also think our relationship with exercise needs to change. I don’t exercise to punish my body or compensate for what I ate. I exercise because I want my body to carry me through a very long and interesting life. And I adjust what I do according to what my body is telling me. If my HRV, resting heart rate, sleep, and overall nervous-system state tell me I need recovery, I listen. Longevity isn’t about pushing harder every day. Sometimes the most intelligent thing you can do is less.
What is your greatest wellness achievement?
Professionally, I think it is having helped build Raison d’Etre, LivNordic, and Six Senses into internationally recognized wellness brands that have touched—and hopefully helped heal—thousands of people around the world. When I started in this industry, wellness wasn’t really an industry. Even the word “spa” needed explaining. We were trying to convince people that prevention, sleep, nutrition, movement, meditation, and holistic health mattered.
To see ideas that were once considered fringe become part of how people live, travel, and think about their health is incredibly rewarding. Personally, my achievement is probably that after more than 30 years in this field, I remain a student. The more I learn about the human body, consciousness, and healing, the more fascinated I become by how much we still don’t understand.
What is the best piece of wellness advice you have ever received and from whom?
Very early in my career, fresh out of business school, I was part of building SATS in Sweden. Björn Sigurd, who was chairman of the board, told me something I have carried with me ever since: “Never stop learning. The day you think you know it all, you are irrelevant.”
It may be the best advice I’ve received, not only professionally but for life. It has kept me humble and reminded me that I am still a student. I try to approach every day as an opportunity to learn and grow, and perhaps, even more importantly, to change my mind. That feels particularly relevant in wellness and longevity, where knowledge is evolving so quickly. The person I trust least is often the person who is absolutely certain they have all the answers.
What do you think is the most exciting wellness innovation you have recently discovered?
For me, the most exciting development isn’t one device or therapy. It is the coming together of science and soul. For a long time, we treated them almost as opposites. Science dealt with what could be measured; spirituality, shamanism, and energy medicine dealt with what could be experienced but was often harder to quantify.
I don’t think we have to choose. I am fascinated by longevity science, biomarkers, AI, mitochondrial health, nervous-system regulation, and regenerative medicine. But I am equally fascinated by consciousness, energy medicine, meditation, shamanic practices, sound, frequency, and ancient healing systems. The interesting frontier is what happens when we become curious enough to explore both. Science can help us understand mechanisms. Ancient traditions can sometimes point us toward phenomena we haven’t yet learned how to measure. To me, the future isn’t science versus spirituality. It is science and soul.
What is your idea of balanced, healthy happiness?
Pleasure without guilt and discipline without obsession. I love longevity, and I am disciplined about my health, but I don’t want optimization to become another form of anxiety. We can become so busy trying to live longer that we forget to live.
I believe in hormesis, fasting, strength training, sleep, and understanding our biology. I also believe in wonderful dinners, laughter, friendships, love, dancing, curiosity, and occasionally doing something that is absolutely not optimized. Health should expand your life, not make it smaller. And for me there is also a spiritual dimension to happiness: connection—to yourself, to other people, to nature, to Mother Earth, and to something greater than the individual self.
What do you think is the most overused word or words in wellness?
Longevity. And I say that as someone who is obsessed with longevity. At the moment, almost anything can be given a longevity label. Buy some red-light equipment, add a few supplements and diagnostics, and suddenly you have a longevity clinic.
But longevity is a different discipline from general wellness. We need to understand mechanisms such as autophagy, cellular senescence, mitochondrial function, metabolic health, and hormesis, and how our behaviors influence the biology of aging.
The gadgets can be fantastic—I use many of them—but the gadget isn’t the philosophy.
Do you have a secret health or wellness tip you would like to share?
Learn your nervous system. We talk endlessly about what to eat and how to exercise, but far fewer people understand the state of their own nervous system, their HRV, resting heart rate, recovery, and stress load. For women in particular, I think understanding cortisol and how our physiology changes are incredibly important.
Your body doesn’t need the same thing every day. Some mornings you should train hard. Another day, the intelligent intervention may be walking, restorative movement, meditation, or simply doing less. Wellness becomes much more powerful when you stop following a generic routine and start responding to the body you actually woke up with that morning.
And I have one very practical rule: don’t look at your phone for the first 30 minutes of the day. We now receive an extraordinary amount of information the moment we open our phones. Why flood your brain with everyone else’s demands, news, and dopamine before you’ve even checked in with yourself?
Use those first 30 minutes for daylight, movement, meditation, breathwork, journaling, your family—or simply silence. And when someone tells me, “But I have to check my phone,” my answer is very simple: set your alarm 30 minutes earlier.
What is your go-to for de-stressing?
My summer house, about an hour’s drive from Stockholm. It is my little paradise, and I go there as often as I possibly can. Nature changes me almost immediately. For me it isn’t only about “getting back into my body.” It is about reconnecting with something larger: Mother Earth, the elements, the trees, water, fire, air, and silence.
My years working with shamanism and energy medicine have made that connection very real for me. Indigenous traditions have understood for thousands of years that humans don’t exist separately from nature. Modern life makes it remarkably easy to forget that. So, I go there, walk, meditate, breathe, spend time outside, disconnect from technology, and reconnect with the elements. Usually, whatever felt terribly important in Stockholm suddenly becomes much less important.
What brings you joy?
My family and friends. I feel incredibly blessed with the people I have around me, and that is probably my greatest source of joy. Then curiosity. Learning. Travel. Nature. Great conversations. Meeting someone who makes me see the world differently. And creating brings me enormous joy. I love taking an idea that doesn’t quite exist yet and turning it into something real. I’ve been doing that throughout my career, from Raison d’Etre and LivNordic to Six Senses and now Wahayla.
I am more curious today than I was when I started, which I consider a very good sign.
What most excites you about your new venture, Wahayla?
The response, quite frankly, has overwhelmed me—in the best possible way. When I created Wahayla, I knew there was a need for a different conversation around wellness, longevity and consciousness, but I wasn’t prepared for how strongly people would respond to it. The interest has been absolutely fantastic. I am busier than I could ever have imagined and have already had to expand my incredibly talented team much faster than I thought I would.
What excites me most, though, is the caliber of the partnerships and projects we are working on. They are genuinely fascinating and stretch me intellectually and creatively in exactly the way I had been looking for. We are building some extraordinary things, and many of them sit in that space I find most interesting—where science and soul, longevity and consciousness, innovation and ancient wisdom meet.
After more than 30 years in wellness, I wanted to put myself back into a position where I didn’t necessarily know all the answers. I wanted to be challenged, to learn, to work with brilliant people from very different disciplines, and to create things that haven’t been done before. That’s exactly what is happening—and probably much faster than I expected. So yes, I am slightly overwhelmed, but I am also having an enormous amount of fun.
How do we ensure future longevity therapies are affordable for the general public and not just the ultra-wealthy?
I think longevity is going through exactly what wellness went through. Five or 10 years ago, people asked how wellness could ever become democratic. Today, much of the knowledge is everywhere. Meditation costs nothing. Walking costs nothing. Sleep hygiene, breathwork, sunlight, connection, and movement—many of the most powerful wellness practices are accessible. The knowledge spread, and people’s behavior followed.
I believe longevity will evolve in the same way. Right now, longevity is overshadowed by the sexy part of the industry: expensive diagnostics, machines, supplements, regenerative therapies, and very beautiful clinics. Some of those things are valuable, but they aren’t the whole story.
Understanding autophagy doesn’t have to be expensive. Understanding cellular senescence, mitochondrial function, and hormesis doesn’t have to be expensive. Many strategies that influence these pathways can be integrated into everyday life. The first stage of democratizing longevity isn’t making every machine cheaper. It is democratizing the knowledge.
Once people understand what longevity actually is, and how it differs from general wellness, they can make informed choices. I think in another five or 10 years we’ll look back and wonder why we ever thought longevity belonged only to wealthy people with expensive gadgets.
How would you like to see the wellness industry change or evolve?
I would like us to become more curious, less dogmatic, and much more comfortable admitting the limitations of every system—including science. I love science. I love medicine. Modern medicine is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. If I have a heart attack, I want an excellent cardiologist—not a shaman.
But medicine was largely built to diagnose and treat disease. Most doctors receive relatively little training in longevity, prevention, nutrition, sleep, stress, consciousness, or many of the lifestyle factors that determine how we age. That isn’t a criticism of doctors; it is recognizing what their system was designed to do.
At the same time, wellness has its own credibility problem. We have gurus, miracle supplements, affiliate links, and expensive treatments supported by questionable evidence. So wellness certainly doesn’t have all the answers either.
And then there is science itself. I used to say, “follow the science.” I still believe deeply in science, but I’ve learned to distinguish science from absolute truth. Science is a process conducted by humans. Studies fail to replicate. Funding creates incentives. Knowledge changes. What we confidently believe today may look very different in 10 years.
Then there is an entire dimension of healing that our current scientific tools don’t always capture well: consciousness, spirituality, energy, ritual, intuition, and our relationship with nature. I’ve spent decades exploring these areas, and I don’t believe we should dismiss an experience simply because we haven’t yet developed the instrument that can fully explain it.
So, I don’t want wellness to become “more scientific.” I want it to become more discerning. Listen to doctors. Study the science. Learn from wellness practitioners. Explore ancient traditions. Use AI. Listen to your own body. Question incentives. Stay curious. And don’t hand your authority completely to any of them.
I think we are moving from an age of experts into an age of discernment. And that may be one of the healthiest changes of all.
