Naval Almanack · procedural note

Happiness Habits

"My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills."

Naval's actual practiced list (source-stated, not invented).

What he stopped / lowered

Lowered identity.
Lowered the chattering of his mind.
Stopped caring about things that don't really matter.
Stopped political involvement.
Stopped hanging around unhappy people.

What he added / increased

Values his time on earth.
Reads philosophy.
Meditates (see Meditation Protocol).
Hangs around with happy people.

Mood-stability habits

Not drinking alcohol → more stable mood.
Not eating sugar → more stable mood.
Not on Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter → more stable mood.
Video games / caffeine → short-term happiness, long-term cost (dopamine cycling).

Choose your five chimps

"Five chimps theory — you can predict a chimp's behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with."

"Many distinctions between people who get happier as they get older and people who don't can be explained by what habits they have developed."
Don't haphazardly pick friends by who you live next to. Happy/optimistic people choose right.
"When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you."

Physical health = priority #1

Naval's explicit ordering: physical → mental → spiritual → family → everything else.

Daily morning workout (no exceptions outside travel/illness — handful per year).
"Whatever it is, do it every day. The best workout is the one you're excited enough to do every day."
"The harder the workout, the easier the day."
Yoga ("one month of consistent yoga and I feel 10 years younger; to stay flexible is to stay young").
Walking meetings (brain works better; sunlight; less monologue).
Cold showers / Wim Hof breathing (suffering from avoidance > suffering from cold).

Diet — source-stated principles

Any sensible diet avoids the sugar+fat combo together (rare in nature; dessert combinations).
Sugar drives hunger, fat drives satiety; sugar effect dominates.
Closer to paleo: mostly vegetables, small amount of meat, berries.
Quality control easier than (and leads to) quantity control.
Fasting from a low-carb base is easier than portion control.
"Subtract before you add" in medicine and nutrition.
"The more processed the food, the less one should consume" (his simplest diet rule).

Easy/hard heuristic (Jerzy Gregorek)

"Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life."

If you make hard choices now (eat well, work out, save, values, relationships), life is easier later — and vice versa.

The modern struggle

"Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs."

Happiness as Default State — the target.
Meditation Protocol — the main mental habit.
Freedom-From vs Freedom-To — habits are what enable freedom-from.

Sources: [Almanack pp133, 145-147, 161-167]