Sure, it feels utterly euphoric plunging your acutely sensitive skin-covered phalanges into that soft, hot, sticky mass of dough, but is that really a sustainable practice?

And I know by now you’ve probably heard countless celebrities and influencers talk about ways to optimize your brain and improve your attention span by taking X new extract, balm, or powder, but my only objective is to enforce simple habits for healthy living.

Take a moment right now — yes, I mean now. Pull your hand out of that cinnamon bun you freak and just be present with me for one fucking second — to survey the environment immediately in front of you. Try to find one figure or experience to excite each of your five senses, i.e. touch, smell, sight, taste, and hearing. For myself, I can feel the keys of my laptop, smell some kind of fire in the kitchen, see black smoke collecting above me, taste *smack* *smack* — what is that exactly, I guess something akin to burnt toast? and hear the crackling of cinder. Now you try it.

If the area immediately in front of you fails to excite all five senses, then, if you have time, try going for a ten-minute walk outside. Replace the feeling of massaging that moist, wet, tacky pastry with that of the soft crumbly soil in your garden. Replace the smells of cinnamon, sugar, and yeast with that of the woodsmoke carried over a crisp autumnal breeze. Replace the sight of that soft malleable yeasty putty being sculpted around the indent of your fingers with that of watching a hare frolic in your local park. Replace the taste of licking that buttery syrup off your fingers with that of a fresh crab apple plucked from the churchyard orchard. Replace the squelching sound that accompanies thrusting your supple hand into that warm glutinous corpus with that of blue jays chirping at your local bird sanctuary. I find this exercise always does the trick; the human senses were truly cultivated to enjoy nature’s pleasures.

Studies show that going outside at least once a day can curb the effects of finger-in-bun withdrawal and actually reinforce the proper regulation of both serotonin and dopamine in the brain. What does that mean in layman’s terms? It means freedom. It means you won’t have to apologize profusely when introducing yourself to a new neighbour, or co-worker, or your partner’s father, when they inevitably try to shake your hand and you’re forced to tell them, “I’m sorry, you won’t want to shake that hand. It’s covered in cinnamon bun goo.” Think of their reviled faces and the gossip they’ll sew afterwards if this is their first encounter with you. If you want to make a better first impression on people, you need to be a better you, and the first step to achieving that is keeping your hands clean. All that nutmeg is turning you into a nutbag.

I don’t mean to get away from my point by ostracizing my audience with hurtful remarks — believe you me, I had my hands in an ungodly number of cinnamon buns during the Covid lockdown — I’m not speaking to you from a position of condescension but rather one of empathy. God knows that the ephemeral orgasmic burst of cinnamon-and-bun-fueled gratification isn’t beyond me. But if you, like I have, can reinforce healthy and sustainable long-term diurnal habits, such as going outside, avoiding seasonal festivals in the colder months, and moving to an area far from local bakeries, there will come a day when you no longer crave the warm, bosomy, mucilaginous tactual embrace of those sweet, sweet buns.

Stop sticking your fingers where they don’t belong. Let those cinnamon buns beeeeeee. Sorry, looks my finger got stuck on the “e” key. Anyways, now I really should go tend to that fire. I must have left something in the oven.

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Jackson Mattocks is a writer and academic from Winnipeg, Canada, pursuing a PhD in English and creative writing at the University of Calgary. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Wild Umbrella, The Metaworker, God’s Cruel Joke, and elsewhere.