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When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. Once my exams came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep concentration fade into infinite scrolling on my phone. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.