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When I was a child, I devoured books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense concentration fade into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to imprint the word into my recall.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it interrupts the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

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

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.