Our Other Muscles

In his Saturday Morning Session talk, Shipshape and Bristol Fashion, Elder Quentin L. Cook quoted Maria Konnikova as having said:

[S]elf-control is like a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it gets. Avoiding something tempting once will help you develop the ability to resist other temptations in the future.

This, I believe, is part of the reason why we're asked to fast every month. When we fast, we exercise our self-control. We "practice" resisting the temptation to eat, and that practice helps us resist other temptations.

Come to think of it, I think all behavioral patterns and personality traits may be compared to muscles. In his Saturday Afternoon talk, Meeting the Challenges of Today's World, Elder Robert D. Hales said that if we don't exercise our faith enough, we could suffer what he called "faith atrophy." I've said before that the way to develop any Christlike attribute is to act as though you already had it, to exercise it, so to speak.

Additionally, what we know about habits reinforces this idea. Any kind of behavior can become a habit if we repeat it enough times. This lends itself to the analogy in both exercise and muscle memory. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved." We can gain strength in performing any action or endeavor, perhaps even until it becomes so easy for us that it practically becomes automatic.

Just as the benefits of exercising can extend to anything we want to do or any trait we want to develop, the warning about "faith atrophy" applies to all our traits and abilities as well. The longer it's been since we tried to control our temper or follow the Spirit, for instance, the harder it will become for us to do those things. Thankfully, this principle also applies to bad habits. Just as our positive traits can weaken when we don't exercise them, our negative traits can do the same.

Elder Richard G. Scott said, "We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day." This is how we exercise the traits and abilities we want and atrophy the others. This is how we can become better people. This is how we can gain righteousness and lose our imperfections. If we exercise and atrophy long enough, we could, theoretically, change everything about ourselves. This, I believe, is the process by which we can truly become like God. By exercising Godly traits and allowing our base human nature to atrophy away, we can become more than what we are now. We can become perfect. All it takes is that we keep exercising and atrophying, starting now, throughout the eternities.