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As a child, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt 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 article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “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 journal, a log 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 maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the picture into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally stirring again.