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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. Once my exams came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, superficial attention.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and listed but seldom used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the exact word you were searching for – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our devices siphon off our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.