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As a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. Once my exams came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

In an era when our devices drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally stirring again.