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When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense concentration fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, 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 keep up. It is often very impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like finding the lost component that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.