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When I was a child, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, 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 neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log 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 easy routine to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into position.

In an era when our devices siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.