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When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.