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As a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a journalling element 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 hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were seeking – like locating the lost component that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.