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When I was a child, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. When my exams arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep focus fade into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element 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 listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more often for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect word you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our devices drain our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.