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As a youngster, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine 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 digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.